Delicate Chaos (27 page)

59

There was a soft knock on the door, then the sound of a key in the lock. A moment later Mike Anderson appeared in the open
doorway. He closed the door behind him and grinned at the sight of Leona Hewitt sitting on the couch with a gun in her lap.

“Nice touch,” he said, nodding toward the gun.

“My newest best friend,” she said, rising and walking over to meet him. She wrapped her arms around her friend and they hugged.
When they finally broke apart, she said, “What happened to your face?”

“A guy named Bawata Rackisha happened to me.” He took ten minutes to recount the story of kidnap and neglect in the dank cell,
sparing her a lot of the more horrific details.

“You ate bugs?” Leona asked.

He laughed. “Lots. They’re tasty. Kind of crunchy, too. Filled with protein.”

“That’s awful.”

His face turned serious. “It kept me alive, Leona.”

She nodded. “You’re probably going to want some sort of a bonus for this. Danger pay.”

The light returned to his eyes and he smiled. “Whatever you’re offering, I’m taking.” He leaned back on the couch. “What about
you? Give me the whole story.”

Leona continued the story from the last time they had spoken face-to-face, in Kinkeads, in mid-July. She wrapped it up with
the attempt on her life the previous evening.

“The police think this guy is tied in with Derek Swanson, the president of the company that was doing this conversion thing?”

“Yes.”

“But you’ve already given your boss the thumbs-down.

It’s a done deal. There’s no way this thing is moving ahead.”

“No, it’s over.”

“This makes no sense at all.” He shook his head.

The phone rang and Mike walked over and picked up. He said hello, listened for a minute, then held the phone out. “It’s for
you. George Harvey.”

“Is that your friend?” Harvey asked when she answered.

“Yes, he’s back from Africa.”

“Good. Listen, I need to speak with you. Are you going to be there for a while?”

“I’m not going anywhere. Are you coming over now?”

“Soon. I have one other thing to take care of on another case. Give me about forty minutes plus the drive. Less than an hour
and a half.”

“What’s this about?” she asked.

“I’ll tell you when I see you.”

“Okay.” She hung up and turned to Mike. “This keeps getting weirder. The detective handling the case is coming over.”

“Did he tell you why?”

“No.”

“Hmm, that’s not good.”

“Why not?”

“We cops are a secretive breed. Mundane things, we use the telephone. The zingers get a house call.”

“What now?” Leona asked. “What the hell else could go wrong?”

“Don’t tempt the fates,” Mike said seriously. “You’re still alive. Worst-case scenario is that changes.”

60

Darvin stayed on the main highway from Morgantown to Hancock, a small border town sandwiched between Pennsylvania, Maryland
and West Virginia. Then he turned south on a secondary road that sliced through the heavily wooded foothills encircling the
northern fringe of the Appalachian Mountains. He was close to the boundary of Shenandoah National Park when his cell phone
rang. It was Greg Stiles, his connection at the phone company.

“I have names and addresses for the numbers you gave me,” he said.

“Well done. What are they?”

Greg repeated the four numbers, then a name and address for each one. Darvin scratched the information down on a piece of
paper while he drove. He thanked his friend, promised to call soon and killed the connection. He glanced at the passenger’s
seat where Derek Swanson was sitting, watching him.

“You seem more coherent now, awake almost. But you don’t have any control over your muscles, do you? Neat drug. One of my
favorites.” He looked back to the road. “We’re almost there. Forty-five minutes, an hour tops.”

Darvin alternated his attention between the road and the list of names. One of them, Mike Anderson, rang a bell, but he couldn’t
remember why. He had an entire file on Leona Hewitt at his house. Maybe when he got home something would click. It usually
did. Patience and organization were two important keys to doing well in the assassination business. He respected both, and
gave them due diligence. As a result, not much got by him. If he was having a feeling about Mike Anderson, it was for a good
reason. He needed to pull the information in his file and look for the connection. It was there. He knew it.

Traffic was light and he made good time on the secondary roads through Fauquier and Culpepper Counties. At Jeffersonton he
cut south for eight miles, then turned east onto Oak Shade Road. The fourth drive on the south side of the road was mostly
obscured by thick hickory and black oak, and he slowed and turned in.

“Almost home,” he said as the car bounced up the gravel access road. The house came into view, a white clapboard structure
with dark shutters. The grounds were landscaped, but poorly kept, with weeds growing in the flower beds and patches of brown
on the grassy areas. Paint was peeling and the edges of the shingles were beginning to curl. A porch ran across the entire
front of the house, a handful of the railing slats cracked or broken. Darvin pulled up and stopped a few feet from the wooden
stairs leading to the main entrance. He turned off the ignition and an instant silence settled over the scene.

“Let’s get you comfy, shall we?” He walked around to the passenger’s door and dragged Swanson out by his shirt. Swanson cleared
the seat and crashed to the ground on his back. Darvin let him hit the gravel hard. “Whoops,” he said, smiling.

“You fucking psychopath.” Swanson labored with every syllable.

“Ahh, you’re waking up,” Darvin said. “That could be dangerous.” He picked up a rock the size of his fist and smashed it into
the side of Swanson’s head. Swanson’s body went limp.

Darvin dragged him up the stairs, across the porch and over the threshold. He closed the door, shrouding the foyer in darkness
despite the clear skies and sun almost directly overhead. A trickle of blood ran from a cut on Swanson’s head and pooled on
the hardwood as Darvin rummaged about in the kitchen for something to drink. He returned to the foyer and hoisted the inert
body up the staircase and down the hall to one of the bedrooms. Inside, he dumped Swanson into a solid wood chair that was
bolted to the floor and lashed him securely to the seat and arms. Then he sat in a recliner facing the unconscious man and
waited.

When Swanson first woke he was groggy and rocked his head back and forth, obviously in agony from the pain shooting through
his brain. Darvin watched him, a wry smile on his face. After ten minutes of watching Swanson drift in and out of consciousness,
Darvin took a plastic bottle of water and shot a spray directly in the man’s face. He sputtered and gasped a few times, his
eyes wide open and filled with loathing.

“Where am I?” he asked, his voice like acid.

“Always the CEO,” Darvin said, leaning back in the recliner and dropping the empty water bottle to the floor. “Always the
one in charge.”

“You have no idea how far over the line you are,” Swanson said. “You can’t kidnap people and get away with it.”

“Oh, this is much worse than kidnapping. I think you know that,” Darvin said. He leaned close to Swanson and whispered, “It
would be murder if I were to kill you.”

Swanson shook his head, water flying from his hair. His voice was still strong but his eyes had lost their defiance. “If you
want money, I’ll get it for you.”

Darvin smiled. “I don’t need money. It’s the one thing I have plenty of. What I need is a little respect.”

Swanson stared at him for a few seconds, speechless, then looked away. The room was large for a bedroom, twenty feet square.
The floors were hardwood and the walls covered with embossed wallpaper. Aside from the perfunctory bed, night table and armoire,
one other piece of furniture, oddly shaped and covered with a white drop cloth, sat about six feet from his chair. There was
a closet set into one wall and a window seat in the gable that protruded into the roofline. The blinds were drawn and the
view was of green fields, treetops and a gravel road bordered by a line of trees. They were in a farmhouse, and the scenery
reminded him of North Virginia.

“All right. Respect. Let’s work on that.”

Darvin shook his head. “You can’t just work on it, Derek. It’s something you have or you don’t. Like class. Some people have
class. They may not have a lot of money, but they have class. It’s in the way they move—how they walk and their body language.
Others have a real problem with it. They may have money, but they don’t have class. Never will. You know the old adage—you
can take the girl out of the trailer, but you can’t take the trailer out of the girl. It’s so true.”

“What’s your point?” Swanson asked.

“Do you think class is hereditary?” Darvin asked.

“I really wouldn’t know.”

“See, you think you have class. I don’t. You also have arrogance and a host of other rotten traits, but that’s a whole different
program on Dr. Phil. We need to stay focused.”

“I’m flattered,” Swanson said facetiously. “But I still don’t see what this has to do with anything.”

Darvin’s eyes flashed with anger. “It has everything to do with why I kill people. With why I have no friends. With why I’m
borderline psychotic.”

“At least you can admit you have mental problems.”

“Influenced entirely by environment,” Darvin said, regaining his composure.

“Not genetics,” Swanson said.

“No.”

“You sound very sure of yourself.”

“I am. You see,” he leaned close to his captive, only a couple of inches separating their faces, “you’re my brother.”

Absolute silence descended on the room. Neither man moved nor spoke. Tiny specks of dust floated between them, highlighted
by the sun pouring in through the window.

Darvin slowly pulled away, his eyes still locked on Swanson’s.

“Bullshit,” Swanson finally said. “Absolute bullshit. I don’t have a brother.”

“Yes, you do. A younger brother. Ever notice how similar our names are? Derek—Darvin. Mom and Dad having a little fun.” Darvin
pulled a rickety wood chair close to Swanson and sat so they were facing each other. “Would you like to know the story?”

“Sure, why not.”

“Your mother and father were human garbage. Mom was the most dominant bitch with a vagina on the planet. Dad was a feeble
excuse for a man. He couldn’t stand up to her. She beat him with yardsticks, electrical appliance cords, even a sock filled
with three or four baseballs. I remember once he tried to tell her no, and she beat him so bad they had to hospitalize him
for almost two weeks. She finally killed him. Hit him too hard.”

“She murdered him?”

Darvin nodded. “While I watched. Whacked him with a bowling pin. Then she dumped his body in the bathtub and told the police
he fell. They believed her. The dumb bastards actually believed her. They’re useless. The police are completely useless.”

Swanson couldn’t help smiling. “A bowling pin. This just keeps getting better.”

Darvin’s face turned dark. “Don’t mock me, Derek. Or I’ll kill you before you hear the whole story.”

Swanson shook his head vigorously. “But you never found
me
. I found
you
when I went looking for someone to kill the union rep.”

Darvin smiled. “That’s exactly what I wanted you to think. I’ll get to that in a minute. Anyway, our parents had a kid—you—and
they decided they were too young and too fucked-up to raise you properly. So they gave you up for adoption. They knew who
adopted you and watched as you grew up. Then, when they were able to properly raise a child, they had me. But there was a
slight problem.”

“What was that?”

“They were still completely fucked-up. Dad worked at the bowling alley, repairing the machines and pins. Mom was a waitress
in a crappy little diner on the highway a block from the shit hole I grew up in. Both were alcoholic, Mom was violent, Dad was
a sissy, and they both gambled. Growing up in that house was a nightmare that you can’t even begin to imagine. I’m not especially
fond of women, courtesy of the queen bitch. And I hate weak men. I don’t like overly strong men, either. In fact, there are
very few people I actually like. But while I was being subjected to a hideously cruel childhood, you were having a great life.
A membership to the country club and money to burn. Nothing but the finest college for your sorry ass. Polo. You played polo
for Christ’s sake. What the hell is polo? Riding around on a horse hitting a ball. How fucking inane is that? Your family
was loving and wealthy, ready to hand you whatever you needed to succeed in life. Everything was given to you. Everything.
Me, I got nothing.”

“Explains the bitterness,” Derek said, wondering where the man professing to be his brother was going with this.

“So I decided to destroy you. Slowly and methodically. To pull you apart like a bug—a wing here, a leg there. The first thing
I needed to do was to get in your life. It was so easy. Remember the redhead at the bar in Clarksburg? I paid her to sleep
with you. She was a dirty little whore, Derek. And you screwed her. How many times? How many times, Derek?”

Swanson shook his head. “I don’t know. It was a long time ago.”

“Sixty-seven. Sixty-seven times, you fucker. At five hundred dollars a shot, that was over thirty thousand dollars. But it
was money well spent. She connected me to you. And I needed to be there for you when you wanted someone roughed up. But you
went even further than I thought you would. You hired me to kill the union guy. Never thought you had it in you.”

“You sick bastard. You paid her?”

Darvin laughed, a strange chortle that echoed about the room. “You should have been in jail years ago, you prick. I dumped
the body, then waited a few days, suited up in some scuba gear and untied the rope that attached the guy’s body to the concrete
I used to weigh him down. Man, he was gross. Underwater for a couple of weeks really does a number on a body.”

“You unfastened the rope so he’d float to the surface? So the police could tie the murder back to me?”

“Yup. But they messed up the investigation so bad they never managed to connect it back to you. Dumb asses. I gave them everything
they needed to convict you, but they were too stupid.”

Swanson swallowed hard. He said, “I have to go to the bathroom.”

“So go.”

“Untie me.”

“Fuck you. Go in your pants.”

Swanson was trembling with fear. “Darvin, I’m your brother. The only family you have left. If I’d known, I would have come
for you. Saved you. I didn’t know. How could I?”

“You would have saved me,” Darvin sneered. “You would have left your life of privilege to help a worthless speck of trailer
trash. I don’t think so.”

Swanson took a couple of deep breaths. “You’ve had it tough. I can fix that. Whatever you want, just ask and I’ll make it
happen.”

Darvin crossed his right leg over his left and leaned back in the wobbly chair. “All right. I want my childhood back. I want
a normal life growing up. I want what you had.”

Sweat beaded on the CEO’s forehead. “You know I can’t give you that,” he said, his voice a whisper.

“Then I guess you can’t make it happen.” Darvin rose and walked to an antique dresser pushed up against an interior wall.
He opened a drawer and withdrew a black satchel, then set it on top of the piece of worn furniture and opened the lid. He
lifted two knives and held them up, one in each hand, the sun reflecting off the steel. He walked back toward Swanson. “So
now we do it my way.”

The odor of urine filled the room.

“I’ve wanted to watch you suffer for so long. I couldn’t wait any longer. I couldn’t wait for the police to arrest you for
Morgan or Buxton’s murder. So here we are. You and I, bro.”

“Darvin, don’t do this.”

“Oh, I almost forgot.” Darvin set the knives down on his chair and walked the short distance to where the drop sheet covered
the piece of furniture. “Before we begin, I’d like you to meet someone.”

He pulled back the sheet. A dried corpse sat in the wheelchair, bony elbows resting on the arms. The empty sockets were staring
directly at Derek Swanson, the mouth twisted in a grotesque scream. Lifeless lips were pulled back and yellow teeth hung from
the jawbone.

“Say hello to your mother,” Darvin said.