Dark Rivers of the Heart (65 page)

“Maybe I’ve always known that I’d have to go back eventually,” he said, unable to look at her.

He put the last of his dinner aside, appetite lost. Sitting lotus-fashion on the bed, he folded his hands on his right knee and stared at them as if they were more mysterious than artifacts from lost Atlantis.

“In the beginning,” he continued, “my grandparents held on to the place because they didn’t want anyone to buy it and maybe make some god-awful tourist attraction out of it. Or let the news media into those underground rooms for more morbid stories. The bodies had been removed, everything cleaned out, but it was still the
place,
could still attract media interest. After I went into therapy, which I stayed with for about a year, the therapist felt we should keep the property until I was ready to go back.”

“Why?” Ellie wondered. “Why ever go back?”

He hesitated. Then: “Because part of that night is a blank to me. I’ve never been able to remember what happened toward the end, after I shot him….”

“What do you mean? You shot him, and you ran for help, and that was the end of it.”

“No.”

“What?”

He shook his head. Still staring at his hands. Very still hands. Like hands of carved marble, resting on his knee.

Finally he said, “That’s what I’ve got to find out. I’ve got to go back there, back down there, and find out. Because if I don’t, I’m never going to be…right with myself…or any good for you.”

“You can’t go back there, not with the agency after you.”

“They wouldn’t look for us there. They can’t have found out who I was. Who I really am. Michael. They can’t know that.”

“They might,” she said.

She went to the duffel bag and got the envelope of photographs that she had found on the deck of the JetRanger, half under her seat. She presented them to him.

“They found these in a shoe box in my cabin,” he said. “They probably just took them for reference. You wouldn’t recognize…my father. No one would. Not from this shot.”

“You can’t be sure.”

“Anyway, I don’t own the property under any identity they would associate with me, even if somehow they got into sealed court records and found out I’d changed my name from Ackblom. I hold it through an offshore corporation.”

“The agency is damned resourceful, Spencer.”

Looking up from his hands, he met her eyes. “All right, I’m willing to believe they’re resourceful enough to uncover all of it—given enough time. But surely not this quickly. That just means I’ve got more reason than ever to go there tonight. When am I going to have a chance again, after we go to Denver and to wherever we’ll go after that? By the time I can return to Vail again, maybe they
will
have discovered I still own the ranch. Then I’ll never be able to go back and finish this. We pass right by Vail on the way to Denver. It’s off Interstate Seventy.”

“I know,” she said shakily, remembering that moment in the helicopter, somewhere over Utah, when she had sensed that he might not live through the night to share the morning with her.

He said, “If you don’t want to go there with me, we can work that out too. But…even if I could be sure the agency would never learn about the place, I’d have to go back tonight. Ellie, if I don’t go back now, when I have the guts to face it, I might never work up the courage later. It’s taken sixteen years this time.”

She sat for a while, staring at her own hands. Then she got up and went to the laptop, which was still plugged in and connected to the modem. She switched it on.

He followed her to the desk. “What’re you doing?”

“What’s the address of the ranch?” she asked.

It was a rural address, rather than a street number. He gave it to her, then again after she asked him to repeat it. “But why? What’s this about?”

“What’s the name of the offshore company?”

“Vanishment International.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No.”

“And that’s the name on the deed now—Vanishment International? That’s how it would show on the tax records?”

“Yeah.” Spencer pulled up another chair beside hers and sat on it as Rocky came sniffing around to see if they had more food. “Ellie, will you open up?”

“I’m going to try to crack into public land records out there,” she said. “I need to call up a parcel map if I can get one. I’ve got to figure out the exact geographic coordinates of the place.”

“Is all that supposed to mean something?”

“By God, if we’re going in there, if we’re taking a risk like that, then we’re going to be as heavily armed as possible.” She was talking to herself more than to him. “We’re going to be ready to defend ourselves against anything.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Too complicated. Later. Now I need some silence.”

Her quick hands worked magic on the keyboard. Spencer watched the screen as Ellie moved from Grand Junction to the courthouse computer in Vail. Then she peeled the county’s data-system onion one layer at a time.

Wearing a slightly large suit of clothes provided by the agency and a topcoat identical to those of his three companions, in shackles and handcuffs, the famous and infamous Steven Ackblom sat beside Roy in the back of the limousine.

The artist was fifty-three but appeared to be only a few years older than when he had been on the front pages of newspapers, where the sensation mongers had variously dubbed him the Vampire of Vail, the Madman of the Mountains, and the Psycho Michelangelo. Although a trace of gray had appeared at his temples, his hair was otherwise black and glossy and not in the least receding. His handsome face was remarkably smooth and youthful, and his brow was unmarked. A soft smile line curved downward from the outer flare of each nostril, and fans of fine crinkles spread at the outer corners of his eyes: None of that aged him whatsoever; in fact, it gave the impression that he suffered few troubles but enjoyed many sources of amusement.

As in the photograph that Roy had found in the Malibu cabin and as in all the pictures that had appeared in newspapers and magazines sixteen years ago, Steven Ackblom’s eyes were his most commanding feature. Nevertheless, the arrogance that Roy had perceived even in the shadowy publicity still was not there now, if it ever had been; in its place was a quiet self-confidence. Likewise, the menace that could be read into any photograph, when one knew the accomplishments of the man, was not in the least visible in person. His gaze was direct and clear, but not threatening. Roy had been surprised and not displeased to discover an uncommon gentleness in Ackblom’s eyes, and a poignant empathy as well, from which it was easy to infer that he was a person of considerable wisdom, whose understanding of the human condition was deep, complete.

Even in the limousine’s odd and inadequate illumination, which came from the recessed lights under the heel-kicks of the car seats and from the low-wattage sconces in the doorposts, Ackblom was a presence to be reckoned with—although in no way that the press, in its sensation seeking, had begun to touch upon. He was quiet, but his taciturnity had no quality of inarticulateness or distraction. Quite the opposite: His silences spoke more than other men’s most polished flights of oratory, and he was always and unmistakably observant and alert. He moved little, never fidgeted. Occasionally, when he accompanied a comment with a gesture, the movement of his cuffed hands was so economical that the chain between his wrists clinked softly if at all. His stillness was not rigid but relaxed, not limp but full of quiescent power. It was impossible to sit at his side and be unaware that he possessed tremendous intelligence: He all but hummed with it, as if his mind was a dynamic machine of such omnipotence that it could move worlds and alter the cosmos.

In his entire thirty-three years, Roy Miro had met only two people whose mere physical presence had engendered in him an approximation of love. The first had been Eve Marie Jammer. The second was Steven Ackblom. Both in the same week. In this wondrous February, destiny had become, indeed, his cloak and his companion. He sat at Steven Ackblom’s side, discreetly enthralled. He wanted desperately to make the artist aware that he, Roy Miro, was a person of profound insights and exceptional accomplishments.

Rink and Fordyce (Tarkenton and Olmeyer had ceased to exist upon leaving Dr. Palma’s office) seemed not to be as charmed by Ackblom as Roy was—or charmed at all. Sitting in the rear-facing seats, they appeared uninterested in what the artist had to say. Fordyce closed his eyes for long periods of time, as though meditating. Rink stared out the window, although he could have seen nothing whatsoever of the night through the darkly tinted glass. On those rare occasions when a gesture of Ackblom’s rang a soft clink from his cuffs, and on those even rarer occasions when he shifted his feet enough to rattle the shackles that connected his ankles, Fordyce’s eyes popped open like the counterbalanced eyes of a doll, and Rink’s head snapped from the unseen night to the artist. Otherwise they seemed to pay no attention to him.

Depressingly, Rink and Fordyce clearly had formed their opinions of Ackblom based on what drivel they had gleaned from the media, not from what they could observe for themselves. Their denseness was no surprise, of course. Rink and Fordyce were men not of ideas but of action, not of passion but of crude desire. The agency had need of their type, although they were sadly without vision, pitiable creatures of woeful limitations who would one day inch the world closer to perfection by departing it.

“At the time, I was quite young, only two years older than your son,” Roy said, “but I understood what you were trying to achieve.”

“And what was that?” Ackblom asked. His voice was in the lower tenor range, mellow, with a timbre that suggested he might have had a career as a singer if he’d wished.

Roy explained his theories about the artist’s work: that those eerie and compelling portraits weren’t about people’s hateful desires building like boiler pressure beneath their beautiful surfaces, but were meant to be viewed
with
the still lifes and, together, were a statement about the human desire—and struggle—for perfection. “And if your work with living subjects resulted in their attainment of a perfect beauty, even for a brief time before they died, then your crimes weren’t crimes at all but acts of charity, acts of profound compassion, because too few people in this world will ever know any moment of perfection in their entire lives. Through torture, you gave those forty-one—your wife as well, I assume—a transcendent experience. Had they lived, they might eventually have thanked you.”

Roy was speaking sincerely, although previously he had believed that Ackblom had been misguided in the means by which he had pursued the grail of perfection. That was before he had met the man. Now, he felt ashamed of his woeful underestimation of the artist’s talent and keen perception.

In the rear-facing seats, neither Rink nor Fordyce evinced any surprise or interest in anything that Roy said. In their service with the agency, they had heard so many outrageous lies, all so well and sincerely delivered, that they undoubtedly believed their boss was only playing with Ackblom, cleverly manipulating a madman into the degree of cooperation required from him to ensure the success of the current operation. Roy was in the singular and thrilling position of being able to express his deepest feelings, with the knowledge that Ackblom would fully comprehend him even while Rink and Fordyce would think he was engaged only in Machiavellian games.

Roy did not go so far as to reveal his personal commitment to compassionate treatment of the sadder cases that he met in his many travels. Stories like those about the Bettonfields in Beverly Hills, Chester and Guinevere in Burbank, and the paraplegic and his wife outside the restaurant in Vegas might strike even Rink and Fordyce as too specific in detail to be impromptu fabrications invented to win the artist’s confidence.

“The world would be an infinitely better place,” Roy opined, restricting his observations to safely general concepts, “if the breeding stock of humanity was thinned out. Eliminate the most imperfect specimens first. Always working up from the bottom. Until those permitted to survive are the people who most closely meet the standards for the ideal citizens needed to build a gentler and more enlightened society. Don’t you agree?”

“The process would certainly be fascinating,” Ackblom replied.

Roy took the comment to be approving. “Yes, wouldn’t it?”

“Always supposing that one was on the committee of eliminators,” the artist said, “and not among those to be judged.”

“Well, of course, that’s a given.”

Ackblom favored him with a smile. “Then what fun.”

They were driving over the mountains on Interstate 70, rather than flying to Vail. The trip would require less than two hours by car. Returning across Denver from the prison to Stapleton, waiting for flight clearance, and making the journey by air would actually have taken longer. Besides, the limousine was more intimate and quieter than the jet. Roy was able to spend more quality time with the artist than he would have been able to enjoy in the Lear.

Gradually, mile by mile, Roy Miro came to understand why Steven Ackblom affected him as powerfully as Eve had affected him. Although the artist was a handsome man, nothing about his physical appearance could qualify as a perfect feature. Yet in some way, he
was
perfect. Roy sensed it. A radiance. A subtle harmony. Soothing vibrations. In some aspect of his being, Ackblom was without the slightest flaw. For the time being, the artist’s perfect quality or virtue remained tan-talizingly mysterious, but Roy was confident of discovering it by the time they arrived at the ranch outside Vail.