SURVIVORS: a gripping thriller full of suspense (Titan Trilogy Book 2) (11 page)

“I can have you transferred to a less secure facility with a stroke of my pen.” Full threat now. She was off the rails but couldn’t stop herself.

Now Jane scowled and countenanced an almost sympathetic expression. “You’re going to persist with that? You just sat there talking to me about how the highest levels of our government can be corrupted by the worst kinds of crimes – you think a max facility keeps me safe?” She smirked. “It doesn’t matter who you work for, you can’t do a thing for me.” She offered a short, barking laugh that raked down Jennifer’s spine like fingernails. “You’re terrified of your own homiletics. I’d watch my back, if I were you, Agent Aiken.”

“Tell me more about Seamus Argon.”

Olivia Jane gestured with her free hand towards Jennifer. “Carefully prepared wardrobe, freshly shaven legs; you washed and blow-dried your hair last night, you picked out that low-cut shirt to show a little brace and bits. The thing is, you’re the same girl sitting there in the library at school, hair pulled back in a flimsy pony tail, frizzing out in the humidity, glasses perched on your nose, no boyfriend, no real girlfriends either. We don’t change. You’ll always be alone. Just like Healy.”

Jennifer could feel her body vibrating with the adrenaline rushing through her. It felt like it came from deep within the center of her being, as if an engine had been switched on – one she had no control over.
Breathe
.

“I know you,” Olivia hissed. “You’re no different from any of my girls; you’re just as repressed.” She narrowed her eyes. “And the barrier around you – you intellectualize everything; keep it at an academic distance – classic defense mechanism. Usually from trauma. Something happen to you, Agent Aiken? Bad relationship? Maybe a little rough handling?”

Olivia blinked, shifted gears, and gave Jennifer a furious once-over, her eyes crawling from Jennifer’s hair to her heels. “Whatever he did to you, I’m sure he’s not sorry.”

Then she stood up, placing the phone back on the table. She half-turned and indicated to the guard to come and get her, and then she looked back through the thick, slightly opaque glass at Jennifer.

Jennifer stood up and shouted through the glass. “What does this case have to do with Seamus Argon?”

Olivia Jane’s face had lost all expression again, reverting back to that impenetrable mask she was able to wear. Once more she appeared nearly inhuman – a person capable of turning on or shutting off emotion at will. A person who, quite possibly, had the control over the deep emotions which Jennifer Aiken did not, much as she fooled herself that she did.

Jane turned slowly, walked away, and the guards escorted her back to her cell block.

* * *

Jennifer left shortly after. She barely remembered going back through security and collecting her things. She wandered the parking lot for five minutes before locating her car. When she finally found it, she unlocked the door with the remote on her key chain and got in. She sat behind the wheel and remained motionless, just breathing in and out, until the energy worked its way through her. She felt the sting of tears behind her eyes, but was able to repress them.

The short drive to Pleasantville had brought about some minor, but welcome, perspective and clarity. Olivia Jane had given her some vital pieces of information, after all. She hadn’t conceded to anything about Heilshorn, and it would probably be impossible to get anything from her as a formal witness, but her slip about the dead cop, Argon, was firmly seeded in Jennifer’s mind.

As she sat in the restaurant, Jennifer worked fastidiously to recall the words Olivia Jane had used during the interview, particularly when she had waxed philosophical about the nature of crime. She wrote in her notebook. When her meal came and was placed beside her, she let it sit steaming on the plate.

Whether they believed in God or didn’t believe in God
, she wrote,
they were each blind to their own evil.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN / Sunday, 9:47 PM

Sloane left an hour later, after calling herself a taxi. Her license was still under suspension from her last DUI – she needed to attend the drunk driver program and then process the paperwork to get it back, but seemed to be in no rush. She insisted Brendan not drive her, despite his attempts at chivalry – she knew he had work to do. They made plans for Brendan to pick her up the next day at noon to go and see Philomena. Sloane said she didn’t get up before ten and then she had a few things to do. He wanted to get things going earlier, but was grateful for the opportunity to have Sloane break the ice with Mena. Men with guns he could handle. Little old ladies half-paralyzed from strokes, not so much.

Brendan was alone in the house. It was time for a thorough search. As he moved through the place devising his simple strategy – check the boxes in the bedroom first, then the office, then go through the basement, and finally look for any hidden places if the basement did not yield results – he was thinking about how two people had showed up on Argon’s doorstep. While they were very different – one a tall, tracksuit-wearing, ex-coke-addict; and the other an incredible survival story, raised in a middle-class home, but gone off the rails – both of them had unloaded a great deal of emotion.

He supposed that this was to be expected. But he hadn’t experienced any of that emotion himself; he was still keeping it at bay. Here he was in the man’s house, and he felt more a stranger to Argon than ever before. Without quite realizing it until now, this was a man who’d been his best friend for the past decade. Yet he only felt numb.

And angry.

Outside the bedroom windows, the dark trees rustled in the breeze; maples, oaks, and bald cypress. Rain which had turned to light snow had frosted the lawns and branches with a white patina that glowed beneath the street lamps. Brendan stood over the double bed in the center of the room, looking down at the boxes in the gloom. He flicked the switch on the wall and a light snapped on overhead.

The shoebox and the lockbox were on the bed. He went through the shoebox first. It was filled with the pictures which Sloane had already gone through – she’d selected one to bring to Philomena. Brendan had let her do this in private. Now he shuffled through them himself, seeing more new aspects of his old friend. Most of the images were not of Argon, but a few featured Argon posing with unfamiliar people. Many pictures were of police functions: annual police balls and awards ceremonies. Men in uniform on the stages of high school gyms, function rooms, restaurants. Argon with his characteristic smile, his eyes shining with the familiar intensity. In most of them he wore a full beard. But as the images seemed to move forward in time, the beard departed and only a mustache remained. Brendan picked one up that showed Argon, dressed in police uniform, in front of Ali’s pizza, posing with a man and a buxom woman in an apron. Cars in the street out in front were distinctive eighties models. This was around the time of Baby Sloane, Brendan thought.

He sifted through more images until he came across a newspaper clipping. “Police Officer Finds Baby in Storm Drain.” There was a picture of Argon, black-and-white and stippled with newsprint dots, standing between two buildings with a fire escape in the alley behind him. Brendan couldn’t see a storm drain in the shot, no grate in the pavement. Argon stood at the mouth of the alley, deadpan in his police uniform and standard-issue police hat, eyes concealed beneath the brim of the hat, but that dark blur of a mustache was apparent. There was a smaller image inset further down in the text. This one showed the tiny infant, swaddled up to the hilt, in a pristine-looking hospital room. The photo had been taken through glass.

Brendan found images of Argon with a woman. He scrutinized these, and decided that the woman was Argon’s sister, Philomena. There was a resemblance in the eyes and the shape of the face, the thickness of the hair. The backdrop was pastoral, a pretty spot near a river – Brendan guessed it was the Hudson River. Another photo of Argon and his sister was more intimate. Argon’s eyes were closed in mid-blink, and Philomena was blowing out the candles on a birthday cake. Argon was wearing a kilt.

There were no pictures of Argon with a significant other, as far as Brendan could work out. He knew that his friend had never married, and had never, as far as he could recall, spoken of a girlfriend. Maybe Argon kept this private like much else, but this was Argon’s personal stash – one would think if there was anyone special in his life, she would show up here.

Brendan set aside a few photos. He thought one was the policeman’s charity ball. In another photo, Argon was posed in between two men wearing suits. City officials, perhaps. And in another, Brendan recognized the mayor of Hawthorne, from about ten years ago.

Seeing this, Brendan recalled the name scrawled on the scrap of paper on Argon’s coffee table – Philip Largo. Russell Gide had known the name readily enough, a state assemblyman in upstate who was doing time for soliciting a prostitute.

Santos, in the AA meeting break, had said that Argon had his sights set. On what? Whom? Was Largo some sort of target?

At the bottom of the box were the usual bits and pieces: some ticket stubs from the US open, loose change, a silver chain necklace, a couple of keys with no chain, a St. Jude medallion, a Celtic symbol on a piece of thin leather, a lighter, and a handful of paper clips. There was one last photo which Brendan had to pry up from the very bottom with his fingernail. Once he had it pinched between his finger and thumb, he realized it wasn’t a personal photo, but a clipping from a magazine. It showed a Scotsman playing bagpipes on a small knoll, with a low fog all around.

Besides the photos he had set aside, he put everything back in the box and put the lid back on.

He looked around the room for the key to the strongbox. After a futile five minutes, he decided to look elsewhere. He searched the kitchen cabinets, the living room bookshelves, the medicine cabinet. Nothing. Finally, he went into the office. The key was probably in the office anyway, but Brendan wanted to check the other spots first – he didn’t want to leave any stone unturned.

Argon’s desk was the kind you might buy at K-mart, made of cheap particle board. There was the main desk, an attachment of two shelves on the right, and one long shelf across the top. These contained different books, police manuals, gun-related manuals, an
Idiot’s Guide to Spreadsheets
, and basic office supplies like envelopes, printer paper, and two stamps left out of a book of ten. There was no sign of the key.

Argon didn’t have a home computer. He had never been the most technically proficient person, and he had seemed to be able to cope without a laptop or desktop PC at home.

Brendan felt grateful for this. A computer would have meant a lot more to look into. Search histories and registry checks and scans to find any and everything.

Brendan, seated at the desk, leaned back and let out a deep breath. Computer or not, this was a massive undertaking. What had Taber been thinking? Brendan knew that this kind of tedium was an essential part of job. No detail was too small. Everything had to be gone through.

Keep going
.

He pulled open the drawer by his right leg. It was a deep drawer that served as a filing cabinet. He started finger-walking through the tops of the files, flipping back the tabs, which were mostly curled over from age, or crushed by items which had maybe sat on top of them. Bank statements. Tax returns. Medical insurance through the job. More stuff on the Mount Pleasant police. A file where he kept instruction manuals – one of them sticking out was for the TV in the other room. Brendan went through these one by one, excluding the manuals. His eyes were burning with fatigue by the time he’d finished. Argon was a middle-class guy, with few investments or holdings, but with a small getaway property on Cape Cod which seemed to offset some of his income tax. Nothing earth-shattering.

Brendan shut the drawer. He looked at the door that led down to the basement. He got up and opened it, and peered into darkness. As his eyes adjusted, he saw a frayed cord dangling in the gloom. He pulled on it and a dusty bulb blinked on in front of him. The stairs led down to the right. Bare wood, no carpet, dusty. He descended.

* * *

The contents of the basement came as something of a surprise.

There was almost nothing down here.

A hot water heater sat in one corner. An ancient looking boiler and a two-hundred-gallon fuel-oil tank were festooned with soft cobwebs. A small stack of wood, maybe only one third of a face cord, sat near the metal doors that opened up to the outside back lawn.

Other than these functional items, there was a dusty treadmill parked off to the side, a rusty snow shovel, a pair of boots with the tongues hanging out and the laces frayed, a few scraps of threadbare carpet; and household utility items, such as two discarded electric baseboard heaters, some pieces of crown molding, and a small rat’s nest of wiring.

No boxes, no storage bins or file cabinets.

The basement was the same dimensions as the house, but the ceiling was low, maybe only seven feet. It hadn’t been finished, and the insulation was exposed between the beams and joists. Brendan guessed the home was modular – modular was a popular building model, particularly in the seventies. Kit homes that promised strong, reinforced lumber for the frames, and clean building lines. They kept their shape and were fairly easy to maintain.

Brendan scuffed along the floor. He felt completely stymied. While he was aimlessly circling the basement, the phone rang upstairs.

He bounded up and snatched the phone while in mid-ring so that it made a resonant chiming noise as he put it to his ear.

“Are you Detective Brendan Healy?”

“Yes.”

“Hi, I’m sorry for the late call. I’m Shalene from Westchester County Medical. In the records office. I see here that you made a formal request for a patient’s medical records.”

“Yes.”

“I’m very sorry, Detective Healy, but we no longer have those records.”

“You don’t have the originals?”

Shalene sounded sheepish. “It looks like we may have mislaid them. We always keep originals – we keep them for about six years. But in this case, it looks like they were misplaced, or they were given out by mistake.”

Brendan thought about this. “Was it you who handed them out? I’m not looking to criticize, but I need to know.”

“No, sir,” Shalene said. She sounded a little defensive, like she might be lying, or protecting someone, because it was clear she wasn’t going to reveal more. “I’m very sorry, detective.”

“I appreciate the call.”

He hung up.

He wandered back into Argon’s room, and stared at the strongbox. It was really all that was left. He just needed the key.

His eyes stung, perhaps from the dusty basement. Or perhaps because it was going on midnight, and he’d been up at five that morning to get his flight out of Laramie.

He realized he didn’t miss his home in Wyoming. In two years he’d never even felt close to belonging there. Maybe that was because he’d spent most of the time locked away in his apartment. The apartment with a view of the Snowy Range of the Medicine Bow Mountains which he ignored to stare into his computer screen.

Always, every night, and the bulk of many days, too, online and doing the same thing.

He realized that this might be the first night in many consecutive months that he had broken the routine.

He sat down on the edge of Argon’s bed, staring into space for a second. Then he reached beside him, picked up the strongbox, and threw it as hard as he could against the wall.