Fatal (13 page)

*****

“So where the hell is she?” With half of his operation under wraps and the other half in parts unknown, Luke Francis was working the odds. His failure to cover all the bases, the camp, the apartment, and the kids’ families was eating at him. For the first time he began to have doubts. Somehow, the girl had slipped away. His preparation and planning had depended on catching them together. When Ronnie had showed up alone, it put a serious crimp in things. Now he faced a statewide hunt in which he could use neither the state nor the local police.

“She can’t have gotten far.” Kyle Barrow was Francis’ lead man in the hunt. He was tall and slender but well muscled. His hair was cut short, military style, touched with grey at the temples. There was a thin scar on his face, running from just above the hairline into the eyebrow over his right eye, a souvenir of a knife fight in a Korean bar. A veteran of twenty-seven years in one agency or another, he couldn’t figure out why Francis was so agitated. They were hunting a girl, a mere whisper of a girl at that, and the boy was already in custody. It was only one of a hundred things that Barrow didn’t know. If he had been given access to all the facts he would have been more worried. The biggest thing he didn’t know was why these kids were being hunted at all.

“You can’t hunt people you don’t know anything about,” Barrow had said when Francis called him in to run the operation. “I need background. Who are their friends? Why do we want them? How desperate are they to avoid capture? All these things make a difference in how she’ll react and where she’ll go.”

He shook his head. “I’m operating in a damn vacuum. All I can do is hand out a picture and issue an All Points Bulletin, and you won’t let me do that. We’ve covered every place we know — every place you’ve told us about anyway.” Francis said nothing. Barrow had had enough.

“I don’t know what kind of operation you’re running here,” he said before he walked out the door, “but if it’s important enough to have you wound so tight, you would be better off telling me what I need to know.”

“Find the girl,” Francis said. “That’s all you need to know.” Barrow sighed and left the door open. Francis could shut his own damn door as far as he was concerned.

*****

Beuhl woke up on his front porch, the stale odor of beer in his nostrils. The moon was falling behind the house, throwing long shadows across the lawn, drowning the porch in darkness. His notebook was in his lap. For long hours after dinner, he sat with it in one hand, a Rolling Rock in the other. There was no need to read the notebook. He knew he wouldn’t find anything. What stuck in his mind was the note written that day. For the first time he saw one of the maddening black Lincolns up close, the one with the boy inside. The face peering out the window startled him. The kid had lost eyes. Wandering around his house afterward, the thought occurred to him that this was something else that didn’t fit, another fact he couldn’t reconcile.

He tossed his notebook aside and stood up. The porch boards were cool on his feet and he thought his days of sitting on the porch in his jockeys were numbered. Another month or two, it would be too cold. Turning to go inside, he caught movement in the corner of his eye, a flicker on the long driveway. The nighttime buzz of insects and animals seemed to have stopped. His hand on the screen door, he scanned the yard, looking for whatever might have caught his attention. Without thinking, he let go of the door, moving to the edge of the porch. Nothing moved, the night was perfectly still, no breeze, and the air laden with moisture. “You’re going nuts, Clay,” he said to himself. He turned to go back and stopped cold.

There was a girl standing in his driveway. She didn’t walk up. He would have seen her coming from a long way off despite the darkness. There was enough light from the moon moon that he could see his pickup clearly, could see the color change between the driveway and the green grass of his yard. What shocked him was he could see the yard behind her, through her. As he watched, the figure grew more solid, began to take shape in greater clarity. Her hair ran back from her head back in an unruly ponytail. Her flannel shirt was untucked, and hanging almost to her knees. Beuhl stepped down onto the top step. He blinked hard once.

“Who the hell are you?” he called out, moving down another step. The figure didn’t move. He could see her lips moving now, but no sound came out. From the highway came the long low blast of an eighteen-wheeler, and Beuhl thought for a moment it was the loneliest sound he’d ever heard. He had reached the bottom step now and the grass felt wet underneath his feet. There were fifteen yards between him and the girl when she finally spoke. “I need your help,” she said. Then she was gone. Clayton Beuhl stood in his front yard in his jockey shorts, smelling beer on his own sweat, wondering if this was what going insane felt like.

*****

Cassie was entering unknown territory, attempting a remote viewing trip without Ronnie beside her. It was Ronnie she was trying to find. She returned to the hotel room and wrapped herself in one of Ronnie’s shirts, an old and worn flannel she’d brought from the camp. The air conditioning was rattling in the window, a sound she found comforting rather than annoying. The bedsprings protested as she stretched out on top of the covers. Outside, she could hear the sound of cars passing on the road. She closed her eyes. Within a minute, her breathing began to slow. Background sounds began to fade away, replaced by a soft hum.

When the break came, it was short and sudden. Cassie ripped out of her body, the strings attaching her to her physical self stretching, finally snapping, and the rush forward began. She found herself hovering over the bed. She watched her body arch, her fingers grasping at the cloth of the shirt. Another snapping push and she was in complete blackness. Immediately, there was the overwhelming feeling of rushing through space, a breakaway momentum she could neither control nor understand. Images flashed through her mind, Ronnie on a bed, an open field, a walled area. Once, she caught a glimpse of Francis sitting behind a desk in a paneled room. He was staring intently at a stack of papers. The image broke, the sense of movement began to dissipate. Cassie found herself hovering over an open area. She began a slow descent. There was a house beneath her, and as she drifted she could see a wide expanse of lawn with a ribbon of driveway running through. The house was dark except for a single light burning somewhere inside.

What Cassie had never understood about her traveling away from her body were the remnants of physical sensation that remained. As she settled to ground she could feel the mud and gravel beneath her feet and the sensation of her weight on her legs. The travel was complete. What she didn’t understand was where her travel had ended up. With her concentration on Ronnie, she thought she would at least be somewhere around him. She had landed in an open area. A well-tended yard lay all around her, stretching off into the distance. There was a truck in the driveway, and she took her first tentative steps toward the house. At the very least, she could try and find out where she was. If she had landed here, then it must have some connection to Ronnie. Maybe he was in the house. A voice cut through the night after her first step.

“Who the hell are you?” On what Cassie had thought was an empty porch, a man was standing. He can see me, Cassie thought, something that had never happened before. She felt suddenly vulnerable. The man moved toward her. As he came out of the shadow of the house, she could see he was barefoot, wearing a t-shirt that said “Virginia is for Lovers,” and a pair of jockey shorts. How she knew, Cassie couldn’t tell, but this man in the middle of nowhere had to be the key to finding Ronnie.

She felt herself leaving, and in a last ditch effort she said, “You have to help me.” The pull started, and before she could even look around again she woke up on a bed in a hotel room in Biloxi. She got up and immediately began getting ready for the drive to Virginia.

*****

“We may have caught a break,” Barrow said. “We picked up a report from a body shop about a stolen truck. It turns out the girl’s father owns the shop.
One of his employees reported it, so even the old man doesn’t know yet. It looks like a white 1972 Ford F150, disappeared sometime yesterday evening.”

“Good,” Francis said. “Let’s take a look at this thing.” Around him, men were busy filling and moving boxes. Francis had decided to take his end of the operation up north. It was getting to be too much trouble, running everything out of a hotel room. The place in Virginia had better space, and more importantly, Ronnie was there. He dug in one of the boxes, eventually spreading a map out on a coffee table in front of him.

“We’ve got to bank on her not going far. If she decided to cut and run, she’s already five hundred miles away and we won’t find her without publicity. We don’t want that. There are only a few places close to New Orleans she can reach. Unless she has someplace we don’t know about. Let’s say a hundred miles. That’s about long enough of a drive to make her feel comfortable.” Barrow bent over the map with him. Interstate 10 ran almost directly east-west through the city. The Gulf lay to the south and didn’t offer much in the way of running room. Barrow tapped the map with his finger.

“That would put her somewhere roughly between the Mississippi Gulf Coast and say, Lake Charles or Baton Rouge, depending on whether she stuck to the interstate.”

Francis took a moment before answering. He didn’t anticipate the girl running, but he couldn’t let on to Barrow what he knew. Her history indicated Cassie would fight. Francis was torn between warning Barrow with enough information to protect himself and his men, or keeping things close to the vest to ensure that knowledge of exactly what Cassie and Ronnie could do didn’t get out.

“I think,” Francis said, “we should concentrate our search to the east.”

“Why?” Barrow asked. “The west is just as good a gamble. Maybe better. There’s less people, more country.”

Yes, Francis thought, but Ronnie is to the east. If Cassie can do half of what I’ve read she can do, she’ll be honing in on him like a beacon.

“Send two teams to cover the west and the north. Everybody else goes east, out to a hundred and fifty miles or so. Cover every hotel and truck stop along Highway 90 and Interstate 10. If she’s headed east she’ll be close to one of those roads. I think 90 is a better bet, but cover them both.” He put on his coat. A flight to Virginia was waiting for him. “And Barrow, tell your men to be damn careful. We want to do this quietly.”

“Damn it, Francis, why do you keep warning me about a kid? This shouldn’t be that tough, but you’re acting as we’re after Public Enemy Number One. She’s a little girl, for Christ’s sake.”

Francis almost didn’t answer. He was tempted to let Barrow take his lumps with Cassie. But that could mean plenty of trouble if they went in unprepared. Trouble seemed to end up on the evening news. “I’ll say it again. Tell your men to take every precaution.” He thought about the folder from Archer. The accounting of the dead in that document read like a combat analysis. As he walked away, he looked back at Barrow. “She’s not like anyone you’ve ever seen. This girl something special. You would do well to remember that.”

Barrow lost it. “Fuck off. Either you tell me what the situation is or I’ll do this on my own, my way. I promise you this, though. If I find out you’re holding back something really important, something that could put my men in danger, I’ll throw you so far under the bus they’ll be scraping you off the wheels.”

“Find the girl, Kyle,” Francis said. “Find her and take her in. Once we do that, everything gets easy. I’ll be at the safe house with the boy if you need me.” With that, he was gone. Barrow sat for a few minutes before getting his men together. Orders were orders. He didn’t have to like them, he just had to follow them.

*****

The interviewer was a woman in her mid-to-late thirties, blonde hair with maybe just a streak or two of grey somewhere in the background. Her face was narrow, just short of pinched. Ronnie thought her eyes her best feature. Bright blue and piercing, they studied him as he sat across the desk. She was wearing a lab coat over black dress-pants and white blouse. Her shoes were sensible flats, designed for someone standing on their feet most of the day. Now her feet were propped on the desk. The interview was going easily. Ronnie was being polite but uninformative, and Dr. Jennifer Wesling was returning the favor.

“From what I’ve read in your folder here, Ronnie,” Wesling was saying, “you have some impressive talents. I have to say I’m skeptical though. I think General Archer may have been an old man with high hopes. There isn’t too much in the way of empirical evidence to work with.”

“I agree,” Ronnie said. “Why don’t you just buy me a bus ticket back to New Orleans and we’ll forget the whole thing.”

“I think we need to talk some more before we make any decisions. After all, I’m not the one in charge. I just answer to my superiors. I have to tell you though, after meeting you I’m having a hard time reconciling you with what your folders say you’ve done. You seem pretty easygoing to me. I’m not picking up any feeling of violence or anger from you.”

“That’s because they gave me my coffee this morning. It was bad coffee, but even bad coffee is better than no coffee. Now, let me get tired of drinking bad coffee and things might change.”

Wesling changed the subject abruptly, a move she had attempted at least twice before in their conversation. “So when you do this Remote Viewing, how exactly do you make it happen?”