The Hawley Book of the Dead (27 page)

Rigel Voss had been named after a star. And a star he was, all through the military schools his parents sent him to, his Navy SEAL father eager for him to excel. He did, and graduated first in his class at Annapolis. He served with distinction and no
apparent physical or psychic injury in Vietnam, went to Yale for graduate studies in behavioral psychology, then to Quantico. He joined the FBI in 1977, one of the best and brightest. Then, on a clear spring day in 1989, when the buds were just sprouting an extravagance of silky young leaves in Amherst, Massachusetts, Rigel Voss met his nemesis, and his charmed life dissolved as surely as if some fissure had opened up to swallow him.

He’d been in charge of an operation at the university there, a huge undertaking involving scores of agents. Like other schools in the Northeast, the university had been besieged by student protests against the military research conducted on campus. Bay State hosted a program that even he was not allowed full access to. It was a black project, and it was big, whatever it was. The security was state-of-the-art. The choice of the university had to do with many factors, its setting far enough from major urban areas, yet close enough to the Boston–New York–Washington triangle to attract top scientists. But perhaps the greatest draw was the intricate network of tunnels beneath the quad. There was an entire underground campus that few knew about. And that appealed greatly to the military. It also appealed to the student protesters, who’d managed to infiltrate it on two occasions, had found out perhaps more than the FBI agents would ever know about the project, and were only lying in wait to uncover more.

He’d been at a meeting in the complex beneath the ground when the most serious breach happened, the breach of Level 6, where even he had no clearance. When he and his agents had been buzzed in, he’d come face-to-face with something so terrifying he still turned his mind from it in a panic whenever he thought of it. He’d also nearly caught the red-haired girl who’d been the perpetrator of the breach. He’d caught her, had hold of her. Then she vanished, right before his eyes, and he’d been so startled he had let her slip away. Abracadabra.

Voss had agents spying on the protesters, ransacking their scummy student apartments, gaslighting the weaker ones. A few had cracked and told their stories. To expendable agents, who would then be reassigned. Voss rarely appeared on the campus in daylight, and never involved himself directly. But for weeks after the breach, no one saw the red-haired girl, and he was getting desperate. He had to know who she was.

Then, his agents started reporting a strange phenomenon. They’d found a black girl who was involved in the protests. They’d photographed a red-haired girl with her, more than once, they insisted, but the red-haired girl appeared in none of the photos. Furious, Voss thought it was a joke his agents were playing on him. But so insistent were they that he broke his own rule. He tailed the black girl himself. He was beginning to suspect the two girls of being the ringleaders, the most elusive of all.

Voss followed the black girl when she borrowed a car, and drove to Greenfield. She stopped at the Indian junk store on Route 2. The red-haired girl stood waiting. His red-haired girl. The two girls talked at the warped, ketchup-stained picnic tables outside. Voss took thirty-six photographs of them, an entire roll, just to be certain. He followed the white Dodge truck when they parted, an easy ride up Route 2. But near Shelburne Falls, something happened. That’s the only way he could describe it to himself later. He’d followed hundreds of suspects and never had anything like it occurred. He must have looked away for a moment, gotten distracted by something he couldn’t quite remember, and the white truck that had been a few hundred feet ahead of him was gone. Worse than that, he couldn’t even remember the license plate. He drove into the village of Shelburne Falls, scoped out the streets, even walked across the Bridge of Flowers, then down to the Potholes, but the red-haired girl had vanished again. Abracadabra.

He developed the photos himself in a darkroom at the FBI
field office in Springfield. He watched intently as exposure after exposure cleared in the wash. He hung each carefully, sat in the red light waiting for them to dry. When they were, he pulled them down, filed them in his briefcase, and left the darkroom.

No one noticed anything amiss with Rigel Voss, Special Agent-in-Charge, Counterterrorism Division. His dark suit hung as elegantly as ever from his lithe frame. His silver-blond hair was as perfectly in place. His hand did not shake as he waved to the security guards at the door. Yet he was shaken beyond anything he remembered. No memory of rice paddy warfare held as much terror for him as those photographs he’d taken. The red-haired girl had laughed and chatted, swung her glowing hair out of her eyes as he’d snapped photos of her with his tiny camera. Now every glossy paper square revealed budding trees and tepees, Maggie Hamilton talking away, apparently to no one.

In the photographs, the red-haired girl was gone.

Later, he tried to ignore the sniggering as he walked through the federal building, past agents who had only weeks before respected or feared him. Now they whispered, smiled, shook their heads. He made his way to Assistant Director Hunter’s office, staring past the sneering faces. He hadn’t been prepared for how fast he’d been turned into a laughingstock. Him. Voss. He’d always been deferred to, his good opinion sought. Not anymore. Not after the series of fiascoes all involving the red-haired girl. It wasn’t in his nature to adapt to this. It wasn’t possible.

Hunter’s secretary, a young woman with good bones and bad skin, who had always before tried to engage him with her very blue eyes, now merely waved him in, hid a smile. Her name was Cinda, he remembered. Cinda, cinders, ashes to ashes. Maybe he
was
crazy.

Hunter clearly thought so. But, Voss had to admit, Hunter tried to salvage what he could of Voss’s career. Did not relish losing SAC Voss. He had the file on his desk, Voss’s latest report, like lines of black ants marching across the page, the photographs fanned. Voss glanced, then glanced away. In the photos, Maggie Hamilton still talked and laughed to the air beside her, no red-haired girl, no one at all near her.

“So this is it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You don’t want to change your report?”

“I can’t, sir.”

Hunter raked a hand over the photos, which skidded to the floor. “Damn it, what kind of game are you playing? You know this means I have to send you for psych testing, take you off the roster. You’ve been at the university for, what? Almost two years, directing that operation. Now it all goes up in smoke, because you say you saw a red-haired girl, first in the tunnels, and now in these photos. That she’s got to be there, even though the photo lab says she’s not. Does that seem even remotely possible, Voss? An entire operation will be discredited, and I will lose one of my best SACs, because of this crap. Because of some disappearing mystery girl only you can see. Does that seem right to you?”

“I’m sorry, sir. I’m only telling it as I saw it. And I wasn’t the only one who saw her. Agents Rivera and Lindley said the same about photos they took. The girl was there. And Lupo. Lupo saw her on Level 6 that night. Two of the scientists did, as well.”

“Yeah. And now they all deny ever seeing her. Swear that one of the scientists fell and hit her head, got hysterical, caused a panic for nothing. No student was ever on Level 6.” Lying scum, Voss thought, looking down at his feet, at the stained brown carpet, not wanting Hunter to see his rage. But Hunter wasn’t responsible. Nor were the cowardly scum Rivera and Lindley. Not really.

“Look. We’ve been over it and over it. Now the only thing I can do is take you off active duty and send you for testing. In the end, you’ll be demoted. I can’t protect you. Not from crazy, I can’t. Your judgment will always be in question. No matter what the shrinks say. You’ll never rise to SAC again. Back to wiretaps, if you’re not canned altogether. Jesus, Voss, if you don’t care about saving yourself, you have a wife and a kid on the way to think about.”

“I know that.” Voss reached into his pocket, pulled out an envelope. “I’m tendering my resignation.”

“Don’t be an ass, Rigel.”

Voss shook his head. It felt as if it were filled with bees. Yes, he must be crazy. Better to admit it straightaway. “I don’t have a choice.”

“Of course you do.” Hunter leaned into Voss’s face. His breath was sour. “Just do this. Tell me it was a joke. Stupid, maybe, but not crazy. What the hell’s so difficult about that? Look, I don’t care if you see ghosts. I don’t care if you see elves dancing around the campus. As long as you don’t file reports about it. You’re a fine SAC. You have a good career ahead of you. Stop screwing around!”

Rigel Voss tossed the envelope on the desk. It fell on his report, the last he would file as an FBI agent.

“Voss, get your ass back here!” He heard a fist slam on Hunter’s desk as he resolutely closed the door. Resolutely walked down the hallways of his past, out the revolving doors into an unknown future.

He didn’t really mean to harm Maggie Hamilton. Not at all. Just follow her, look for her red-haired friend. Talk to them, that’s it. Find out about the infiltration of Level 6, the photographs, how it was done. The red-haired girl must be the key. She must be the one behind all the unrest, the demonstrations. It must be her. Why else would her identity be so hidden, fading
her even in photographs? It must be some trick she knew, that Maggie knew. He’d find them, find the answer. Go back to Hunter, be reinstated. It would be simple.

The first time he drove to Maggie’s apartment there were no lights on in the big Victorian. It was dusk, a beautiful spring evening. All the students like bright moths on the common, playing Frisbee, grabbing a burrito from La Veracruzana, studying in Classé Café over endless cups of coffee. Or in the Tower library, looking out from their carrels over the farmland, tobacco barns, and sunset over the pastoral valley that held the university like a cupped palm. It didn’t seem like an evening for plotting the overthrow of the administration, longing for the blood of research scientists, or firebombing secret tunnels. The future of biowarfare was safe on such a night.

He parked along the stretch of Amity Street where the large houses had been divided into warrens for students. Strode to her house and around the back, pulled on gloves, lifted a low window, and climbed into the apartment. Such snooping had been beneath him for years, but he found it easy, and interesting. The fading light showed enough of Maggie’s one room: one bed with an Indian spread in pink and green, one desk with a book of poetry and a typewriter, and one locked drawer. A cement block and board bookshelf, a file cabinet, also locked. Voss broke the desk drawer, yanked out bills, a blank notebook. He flipped through the book on the desk, then pulled one book after another from the shelves, shook them out, tossed them. One heavy dictionary landed on the glass coffee table, cracking it in half. The file cabinet was flimsy; it was easy to break the lock with his pocket tools. He took what files looked promising (Letters, Financial Aid, Bank), threw the rest (Electric, Heat, Term Papers) on the pile of books. He looked for phone records but didn’t find them. Didn’t see a phone at all. He went through the kitchen cabinets methodically, dumped flour, sugar, rifled through the refrigerator. Then he
slipped out the window, closed it after him, walked to his car in less than full dark, the street hushed. He saw no one. It had taken him twelve and a half minutes to go through this girl’s life, take what he wanted. The next day, he took the girl herself.

It was that day, April 23, 1989, that started Voss down a trail of funhouse mirrors: the end of his family, then obsession and ignominy and menial jobs. After long years of fruitless searching, he had found the red-haired girl, now a woman. It had taken him more than twenty years.

On November 10, 2012, he was working in a warehouse outside Minneapolis, where remaindered books and DVDs waiting to be shipped were stored. He cared only for books about history, neutral books about times past, about wars and presidents. He didn’t even own a TV. He might never have come across her, but in that warehouse, he was moving pallets of books and noticed a cover photo. A red-haired woman with a crow perched on her arm, and a smiling blond man, dressed in a tuxedo. Voss jumped off his forklift and sliced the ribbon of yellow plastic binding the books to the pallet. He grabbed one and read the jacket, stared at the photos. Then he pocketed the book and walked out of the warehouse without even shutting down the forklift. That was the day his hunt began in earnest.