The Glass House (13 page)

“We need some information, Mr. Laurence.”

“Sure, always happy to help the federal constabulary for a price.”

“You want money?” Emerson demanded.

Garreth did a full turn, his arms wide. “Does it look like I need money?”

It looks like you need a good cleaner is what it looks like,
Yslan thought, but she said, “What price?”

“Decker Roberts, the child murderer. Decker Roberts.”

Yslan wanted to say, He's no child murderer, then explain about him being left-handed, but instead she said, “When we find him, I'll inform you.”

“Are you saying you don't know where he is?”

“We know he's in Africa.”

“Then for the love of Christ get a plane and haul his fucking ass back here.”

That one she could agree to, so she said, “I will.”

“Good. Bring him here, then I'll answer your questions.”

“No,” Emerson said. His “no” left no ground for contradiction. “Answer our questions, Mr. Laurence. And answer them now.”

“That sounds like a threat.”

“It is,” Emerson said, then in rapid succession he knocked the drink from Garreth's grasp with his left hand and broke the man's nose with his right.

Yslan was as shocked as Garreth—she'd never seen Emerson do anything like that.

From his knees, his hand over his face, blood dripping between his fingers, Garreth said, “Pretty muscle, who woulda thought.” Emerson took a step towards the man and Garreth said, “Make me a drink, then I'll answer your questions.”

Emerson moved to the counter and poured three fingers of fine bourbon into a glass that smelled of fermenting orange juice.

Garreth had struggled to his feet and sat heavily on a chair at his dining room table. The blood had slowed to a trickle. His nose was quickly swelling and now had a sharp crook to the right that had not been there before.

Emerson held out the drink and Garreth took it. After one long swallow he reached up and felt his nose—then yanked it to the left, then sharply down.

Yslan heard the scrape of cartilage and was amazed that Garreth didn't even wince.

Garreth put a finger on one nostril then blew hard. A wad of mucus and blood splatted to the dark hardwood floor. Garreth nodded and said, “Good. Just a broken nose—no sinus damage.”

“San Francisco,” she said. Her voice was hard as honed steel.

Garreth looked up at her. His eyes were blackening. “Nice city. They have a homeless problem.”

“You were there.”

“No kidding. That's where your people drugged and kidnapped me.”

“What were you doing there?”

“Waiting for Decker Roberts to come and claim his kid.”

“Seth?”

“Yeah, that's his name.”

“And you cased that place?”

“The Wellness Dream Clinic? Can you believe that nonsense?”

“Yeah, that place. You cased it?”

“Yeah, sure.” He made air quotes with his fingers as he added, “Cased it.”

“What did you learn about it?”

“It was a sham! Dream Wellness, what crap!”

“What else?”

“The patients weren't even patients, neither were the help. They all arrived at six in the morning and left at ten at night.”

“Why?”

“They were actors or something.”

“Actors?”

“Look up an ad in the
San Francisco Chronicle
for a TV show
called
The Institution.
They were auditioned then hired to play parts.”

“By whom?”

“The grey-haired freak who ran the show.”

Yslan tensed. She took out the blowup of the members of the Path. “One of these people?”

Garreth pointed an unsteady finger at the tall grey-haired cellist.

“Name?”

“Is that what this is all about?”

“Name. Just give us his name.”

“Give me the murderer Roberts and I'll give you the freak's name.”

“He's not a murderer—”

“Wrong, lady!”

“Right, you old drunk. When you found five-year-old Decker Roberts, was there blood?”

“A regular ton of the stuff.”

“And where was the blood?”

“On the boy's right hand. It was covered in it.”

“His right hand?”

“Right again, lady.”

“Well Decker's left-handed.”

“What?”

“He's left-handed. Has always been left-handed. So how the hell could he have ended up with blood on his right hand? More to the point, even if he was right-handed, he was only a little boy. A five-year-old kid! How could he have been strong enough to kill that girl, with a garden trowel, in his wrong hand under the weight of all that snow? Isn't it more likely that he took the garden trowel from her and tried to dig their way out? Isn't that a more likely scenario? You're a cop, or at least you were a cop. And according to your records, a darned good one before you met Decker
Roberts. So isn't what I just said the probable truth? He took the trowel from the girl, he tried to dig their way out and he cut her somehow. Isn't that probably what happened?”

Garreth sat very still for a long time then muttered, “Probably.”

“What's the man's name in the photo, Detective Laurence?”

“The grey-haired freak?”

“Yes, him.”

“WJ something or other.”

“WJ what?”

“I'm not a cop anymore, so I don't have access to the resources, you know what I mean?”

“Not exactly.”

“I copied all the data from his computer—”

“From this WJ guy's computer?”

“Who the fuck we been talking about?”

“You still have it?”

“Hey!” he said, standing unsteadily. “I'm still a copper—still a copper.”

Shortly he produced a USB key. “Here,” he said. But his voice was little more than a whisper. He turned and walked away from them towards the bourbon bottle. As he did it seemed to Yslan that he got smaller and smaller—till there seemed to be little left of Garreth Laurence Senior.

Emerson plugged the key into his laptop and shipped the data off to Mallory.

• • •

Outside Garreth Laurence Senior's $650,000 two-bedroom house, Emerson looked at his iPhone. “It was the computer that was corresponding with Harrison through the synaesthetes' website.”

Yslan nodded and said, “Maybe this WJ didn't like a competitor.”

“A competitor for what?”

Yslan ignored Emerson's question. She wasn't going to get into that with him. “We can assume that WJ poisoned Harrison—maybe
to get him out of the way—and we know that he has Seth, who Harrison, from his password, evidently believes is number one.”

Spartacus,
Yslan thought—
fucking Spartacus.
She stood in the early morning heat, turned her right palm upwards, then slammed it into her forehead and swore, “
Spartacus
!
”

“What about
Spartacus
?”

Yslan looked at him, but she wasn't going to tell him that she was being flooded by the images on her tape of one of Decker's acting lessons. The lesson stood out because it was the only time Decker ever mentioned another acting system than his own. And it was one of the few times that Decker actually cracked himself up as he talked to the actors in his class. The image of him giggling uncontrollably made her smile.

He was explaining the origin of the presentational method of acting that had for some time dominated Canadian stages and had stopped Canadian actors from making major inroads into the American film and TV industries. Some of that presentational acting grew out of the Delsarte acting system, which was a classic of its kind. It postulated that there were an exact number of human emotions and that each one was represented by one and only one specific gesture.

Yslan remembered laughing aloud as she watched Decker illustrate some of them. Then he had added, “But the system hasn't really died. If you've ever seen the movie
Spartacus,
Olivier uses one of the classic gestures when he is told that the upstart Spartacus leading the revolt was the same man he saw refuse to kill the black gladiator in the forum. When he receives this information he takes his right hand, turns it palm up, then slams it into his forehead—the Delsarte gesture for the emotion of “I am astounded.”

“I repeat,” Emerson said, “what about
Spartacus
?”

“It was right in front of us all this time—right in front of us. We find Seth, we find the guy who poisoned Harrison—WJ. Get us on the next flight to San Francisco.”

Emerson stopped and turned back to Garreth Senior's house. “And what about him?”

“A month,” Yslan said.

“Till what?”

“He ends it. Believing Decker Roberts killed that girl gave him the excuse he needed to not fall off the face of the earth. Now he has no excuse.”

“Hence a month?”

She glanced at the house and was pleased that she didn't hear a gunshot, although she knew it would not be all that long before Detective Garreth Laurence Senior took the bullet train. Then an odd thought struck her:
Garreth Laurence Senior was just another person hurt by his contact with one of her Gifted.

HENDRICK H. MALLORY, HEAD OF HOMELAND
Security, locked the door to his office. Out the window the lights of D.C. blinked and bobbed in the humid heat of the night. He turned on what he called “my snooper” and waited for the electronic all clear.

It dinged and he crossed to his printer and pressed the decrypt code.

Emerson Remi's latest report slid onto the tray. He admired his manicured fingernails as he picked it up. He read it quickly.
So they're on their way to California. It's about time,
he thought,
although that's fine, it gives number four enough of a head start. They all have to get to the Junction at the same time, damn it!
He put Emerson's missive to one side and turned to the far wall, whose twelve foot by sixteen foot surface was covered by a blowup of the interior of Leonard Harrison's secret room. What he thought of as Harrison's world of wonders. For the hundredth time his eyes sought out the numbers on the photo that he'd taken well before Special Agent Yslan Hicks “found” the secret room. He chuckled as he thought of Hicks chasing after the third set of prints up there. He had long ago had all his prints removed from the data banks.

From his techs' deciphering of Harrison's searches on the synaesthetes' website, he knew who the numbers represented.
Number 4 was Martin Armistaad, whose release from Leavenworth he effected with remarkably little effort, complete with tracking tooth. Number 3 was Viola Tripping, whom he first saw at Ancaster College shortly after the bombing and who now was hidden somewhere in the American Plains States. Number 2 was Decker Roberts, who he knew was a long way from the Junction, somewhere in southwest Africa.

He went to his desk and opened a bottom drawer, then unlocked the safe that was secreted there. He pulled out a large file, some of whose folders went back forty years to when he first began to suspect that there were others who sensed the world—the other world—more deeply than he did. He'd gone through the normal routes to find the “other,” the religious routes—the Catholicism of his birth, studies in the Tibetan Book of the Dead (the bardo idea dominated his thinking for years), the Kabbalah—but he eventually came to the conclusion that all religious systems sensed something out there but none had even an inkling how to access “the other.”

It was his Introduction to Botany class at the University of Chicago of all things that opened his eyes to another possible access point. His elderly professor claimed to be a synaesthete. He memorized large sections of ancient texts through his sense of touch. He claimed that different sounds induced different feelings in his body. The man's condition didn't interest Mallory, but a phrase he used certainty did: “Nature always seeks a balance. When it takes away something it always—always—supplies something else in its place.”

He'd raised his hand and in that huge lecture hall asked, “Do you consider your synaesthesia a gift?”

“I do,” the old man had replied.

“Well, where is the ungift?” he'd asked.

There were titters in the class, but the professor ignored them and asked, “Can you explain yourself more clearly?”

“Yes I can. If nature always seeks balance and you have been given a gift, doesn't that mean that someone else has to have something taken from him?”

The old professor had done a little Texas two-step and metaphoric tap on his head, then moved on without answering his question.

But it had begun Mallory's search, and now as he spread out the files on his desk of the forty-seven individuals throughout history that he'd identified as having a “gift,” he reached into another drawer and withdrew a much larger folder—those who had the matching “ungift.” Nature's balancing act was often incredibly cruel.

He flared out the files like two large fans, one above the other, then lifted his eyes to Harrison's world of wonders. He knew that his seeking of the Gifted had proved yet again the cruelty of nature's response.

He stood and approached the world of wonders.

It was number 1 that he concentrated on—up in the sky by the blood-red star in the body of Scorpio.

He was a Scorpio both by birth and inclination, but he knew number 1 was not him. He knew who number 1 was. As Harrison's password so elegantly pointed out: #1=Seth. Yes, but where in this wide world was Seth? And what exactly would happen when all four and the catalyst—Hicks—were together in the Junction, as Harrison's world of wonders indicated?