The Nature of the Beast (29 page)

He punched the overhead lights and looked around.
Everything was as he
’
d left it.
How long ago was that?
He ran the sequence of the days in his mind.
A week.
He
’
d been gone a week.
Seemed like longer.
Seemed like…

The music stopped.
He strained his ears.
Heard the snap of a lock.

The sound of laughter in the hallway sent him from the door, out into the parlor, where he crossed to the front windows. Nothing.
He listened to the fading voices and then counted three hundred and peeked again.
Still nothing.

He carried the boy into the bedroom and threw him on the bed.
The boy stirred and rolled over but did not open his eyes.
He stood for a moment, staring down at the unconscious child, then walked over and pulled the window wide open and checked the alley behind the building.
The snow muffled the usual roar of traffic.
The only sound was the hydraulic whine of a garbage truck at the far end of the alley.

What to do?
What to do? He asked himself the question thirty or forty times and then felt around in his pocket and came out with his knife.
He flicked it open and stood there, twisting it this way and that, catching the reflected streetlights on the bloodstained blade and looking over at the little boy.
What to do?
He
’
d never felt more alone.
Never felt more confused.
He
’
d done his duty.
Done his duty but it wasn
’
t better. It was supposed to be better, but it was worse. He wanted to scream and thrash but didn
’
t want to have to decide what to do next, so he pocketed the knife and walked out into the parlor, closing the bedroom door behind himself.

He did what he always did.
He snapped on the television.
Commercial for the Harvey Winter show.
He always watched Harvey Winter, so he stopped in his tracks, grabbed the remote and turned the volume up. Cut to a picture of the same two hags he
’
d seen earlier. The announcer blared on.
“
What is is that the U.S. government is keeping from this family?
”
The pair of cows were crying now, blubbering into a microphone.
Making fools of themselves.

Picture of a small boy.
He turned away from the screen.
When he turned back, the picture had changed.
His breath caught in his throat like a fishbone.
Harry Joyce, the caption read.
He gulped air and spit on the TV screen.

Back to the announcer and the mewing hags.

As he stood there, listening to them sniveling out the story of Colin Sattersomething, it suddenly came to him and, for once in his life, he knew exactly what he had to do next.

He pulled the knife from his pocket, wiped both sides of the blade along the side of his pants and walked toward the bedroom door.

53

Three abreast, they double-timed it across the brightly polished marble, using the brisk pace to work out the kinks.

“We’ve got a semi-happy ending,” Dan Rosen said. “We’re going to let it go at that.”

Craig was incredulous. “That crazy son of a bitch killed a dozen people, women, old men, not to mention seven federal agents and we’re not going to follow up on this? We’re going to leave it to the CPD and the FBI to clean up after us? I can’t believe you’re saying this. There’s still a kidnapped boy out there somewhere.”

“It’s a jurisdictional matter,” Bobby drawled.

“He murdered Gil and Emelda Fowles, tried to kill one of their children and kidnapped another. How in hell can you let some other agency pull the rug out from under us like this? How can something like that happen?”

“Special Agent Craig…” Rosen’s voice took on an executive edge. “This isn’t personal. This is strictly business.”

“Everything’s personal,” Craig snapped. “And, if you don’t mind me saying, you watch too damn many gangster movies.”

Bobby grinned. “What Dan means to say…” he began.

“Dan said what he meant to say,” Rosen said quickly. “It’s not personal.” Without slackening his pace, he leaned forward and looked around Bobby Duggan. “You were there. You saw it. This was a done deal before we ever arrived. Their minds were made up. They only invited us as a courtesy. This is their turf. If they want to take it from here, they take it from here.”

“We chased that murdering son-of-a-bitch most of the way across this country.”

Rosen wasn’t impressed. “Which is
why
they invited us to sit in. Your efforts were lauded by one and all and I’m sure they will be duly noted, but this is where the agency gets off the bus. Period. End of story.”

As they rounded the corner into the Security Reception area, a pair of uniformed FBI personnel interrupted their banter and quickly snapped to attention. One greeted them like a headwaiter, the other found their overcoats.

Outside, the sky had begun to hemorrhage snow. Little frozen crystals, fine as Kosher salt, filled the air. Cars on the street had their lights on, their wipers thrashing as they moped along through rapidly gathering slush.

The L.A. contingent bundled themselves against the elements. As usual, Bobby sought to alleviate any internal tension. “A body can get real spoiled about weather, livin’ out in La La land,” he commented. “Can any of y’all imagine what the 405 would look like in this kinda weather?” He shook his head in country-boy wonder.

A black Lincoln Town Car pulled to a stop under the portico. The driver got out.

Craig looked away. Up at the enormous FBI seal on the wall. Fidelity. Bravery. Integrity. The scales of justice. None of which, at that moment, meant a hell of a lot to him. It was all he could do not to sneer.

Bobby buttoned himself all the way to the top and turned to Craig. “We’ll be seeing you when?” he asked.

“Soon as they let my partner out of the hospital,” he answered.

“Call Marlene. She’ll arrange transport,” Rosen said over his shoulder.

The uniforms opened both outside doors. The two men walked through the opening and out onto the concrete. Rosen had wrapped a long red and white muffler around his neck. The kind of thing somebody in the family must have knit for him, otherwise there was no possible excuse for wearing it. Bobby pulled his chin down into his coat like a turtle and began to hop from foot to foot.

“Send whatever data you have over to the bureau office on Roosevelt. Attention: Special Agent Gomez. When you get back to the coast we can discuss your next assignment,” he said. He put a paternal hand on Craig’s arm. “Be sure to convey our regards to Special Agent Williams,” he said.

__

She had the hospital bed cranked up as close to vertical as it would go. Those areas of the bed not covered by Audrey Williams were piled high with an assortment of paperwork. Confidential NSA memos, FBI forensic reports, charts, graphs, files, folders, you name it. She looked and smiled up as Craig entered the room.

“Hey,” she said.

“What’s all this?” Craig asked.

“Our intelligence requests have finally caught up to us.” She started a shrug, winced and thought better of it. “I figured as long I was lying here, I might as well see if there was anything we missed the first time around.”

At the foot of the bed, an enormous spray of flowers dwarfed the narrow table, an arrangement of such a scale and magnitude as to suggest a Mafioso funeral rather than a family ‘get well soon’.

Audrey made a face. “My mother,” she said.

“How you feeling?” he asked.

“Like I’ve been in a car crash.” She ran her eyes over his face. Something was amiss. “What’s up?” she asked.

“We’ve been shut down,” Jackson Craig said.

She folded her arms and frowned. “Shut down how?”

“A joint CPD-FBI task force is going to take the investigation from here.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Soon as they let you out of here, which I’m given to understand will be some time after four this afternoon. Soon as that happens it’s back to LA.”

There didn’t seem to be anything to say, so neither of them bothered.

Craig walked to the window. The snowflakes were larger now and more insistent. Coming off the lake at a thirty-degree angle, reducing the building across the way to bleary Impressionism.

To his right, snow was beginning to accumulate on the streets in earnest. He watched the number ninety-four METRO bus slog its way over to the curb to pick up a woman in a red babushka, then fishtail twice as it plowed its way back into the nearest lane.

“We have a departure time yet?” she asked.

“Little after eight tonight. Midway.” He glanced in her direction. “And not we…
you
. I’m going to hang around for a couple of days. Help out with the transition.”

“Oh,” was all she said.

“Car and driver here for you at seven. After he gets you where you’re going, he can take this stuff over to the bureau.”

A longer and more profound silence settled over the room.

“Something interesting though,” she said finally.

“What’s that?”

“The CPD surveillance tapes,” she said, picking through the piles of information with which she had surrounded herself. She found what she was looking for and held a green folder out to Craig. “Bio-Metric analysis of the images from the moving and storage place and the little bodega,” she said.

Like most recent technological advances in the field of personal recognition,

Multimodal Biometric Analysis had originated as a response to the needs of the gambling industry. Conceived and nurtured by the industry’s ultra-deep pockets, several new technologies had been engineered to thwart the ever-increasing army of cheats and grifters plaguing the casino business, who had gladly provided the seed money for innovations designed to extract data from digital video images. Facial-recognition software, algorithmic iris recognition, fingerprint analysis, stride and motion analysis…every reading stored and reduced to a single digital thumbprint to be stashed away for future comparison. Your very own bar code.

“We’ve got a bio-metric flag on one of the women from the bodega video,” she announced. “Everybody else checks out.”

Craig was unimpressed but didn’t say so. As far as he was concerned, bio-metrics still required further tweaking before he’d consider it a truly useful tool. The programs regularly flagged dwarves and midgets as children in disguise and identified the gender of seriously obese people more or less at random, but, not wishing to appear the stodgy Luddite, he moved around to the side of the bed, got down on one knee and looked over her shoulder at the screen. She smelled of soap. Nothing fancy either. Dove or Ivory, something like that. For some reason that excited him no end. The screen blinked to life.

Jump to the bodega. East Indian clerk reading some sort of skin magazine. A woman strides into the frame. Medium length dark hair cut in bangs. Raincoat. High cheekbones and higher heels. Next angle. Coming right at the camera in super-slow motion. Then picture freezes on the screen.

A maze of digital indicators suddenly surround the woman’s picture. Lines, arrows, numbers, everything updating itself in real time as the woman’s digital image stood frozen on the screen.

Audrey began to inventory the data. “Caucasian. Somewhere between five eleven and six feet one. Allowing for four-inch heels. A hundred and seventy-five to a hundred and eighty-five pounds.”

“Big gal,” Craig commented.

“Body scannings say she’s between twenty-five and thirty.”

“Where’s the flag?”

Audrey tapped the keyboard. Another jump. Exterior camera.

The woman leaving the store, cutting across the street at an angle, bags dangling from her hands as she hurries home. She pointed at a blinking green line on the screen.

“There, “ She touched the screen with a manicured fingernail. “The computer finds something anomalous about the way she walks,” Audrey said.

Jackson Craig pushed his nose closer to the screen. “Make her move,” he said.

Audrey complied. They watched as the woman mounted the sidewalk and quickly strode out of camera range.

“She’s kind of klutzy. But, I don’t see anything untoward,” Craig said.

Audrey pointed at the bottom of the screen. Another green line was blinking.

“Four-and-a-half miles an hour. Ninety-three strides a minute.”

“Long strider,” Craig commented.

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Audrey looked up from the screen. Their eyes met. “Where have I heard that phrase before?” she asked.

“Arizona.”

“That Mr…. Mr. What’s his Name. The tracker guy in Arizona.”

“Begay,” Craig said. “Harden Begay.”

“Those were his exact words. He said our perp was a long strider.”

Second time through the tape, they watched in silence up until the point where the woman paid for her groceries. “Stop,” Craig said as she reached to collect her change.

The screen image froze at the point where their hands nearly met above the scratched glass counter, all very Sistene Chapel, God reaching out to Adam.

“Big hands,” Craig ventured, pointing. “Bigger than the clerk’s.”

“It’s him,” Audrey said.

“It’s been right in front of our faces the whole time,” Craig said. “We should have guessed.”

Audrey shrugged. “Not even exotic anymore. Lots of cross-dressers in the world,” she said. “Doctors. Lawyers. Indian chiefs.”

“This would certainly explain why that unfortunate rookie patrolman walked right up into knife range.”

Audrey had to agree.

“Might even explain all the women’s clothes and lingerie we found at Harry Joyce’s place, way back when.”