The Living End (18 page)

I called Pixie on my way downstairs. She told me she was on her way to St. Jude’s to start prep work for the evening meal. I arranged to meet her there in twenty minutes and hoped I didn’t get conscripted into peeling potatoes.

I walked out under the watchful gaze of the Cinco Calles, feeling eyes on the back of my neck. The kid on the street gave me a nod and gestured to my car. Untouched, like he promised. I started up the Barracuda’s ignition and the radio came on, tuned to the hourly news. My ears perked up.

“—raid of a homeless shelter resulted in the rescue of nine people who were allegedly being kept in a makeshift prison cell. The prisoners, who were heavily drugged so they could not identify their abductors, have been taken to local hospitals. An official statement came from FBI Special Agent Harmony Black.”

Harmony’s voice drifted from my car speakers. “Thanks to the efforts of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police, we were able to take decisive action. We believe that the prisoners were being forced to compete in what the perpetrators called a ‘bum fight club,’ streamed to a paying audience over the Internet. At this time we cannot release any names or details about the persons responsible—”

I flipped over to the blues station, swapping Agent Black for a crooning Billie Holiday.

“Couldn’t even give me a thank-you call,” I muttered as I put Jennifer’s fortress in my rearview mirror. It was a good bit of spin, I had to admit, with an explanation just sleazy enough to be believable. The media had the attention of a gnat hopped up on raw sugar. A week from now, nobody would think to follow up on the story.

Pixie waited for me on the sidewalk outside St. Jude’s, wearing an army surplus canvas backpack and pacing a groove in the concrete. I guessed she’d heard the news, too.

“So how much of that was total bullshit?” were the first words out of her mouth.

“Ninety-nine percent of it. Only true part is that they got nine people out, plus the two who left with me. Some of the others didn’t make it. Anyway, job’s not done.”

“No kidding it isn’t. I know thirty people who disappeared, and that’s
just
our regulars. There’s no telling how many people are still missing all over the city.”

It’s not our only clinic
, Nedry had said back at the standoff.

“That’s not all,” Pixie said. “Remember how I broke down the whole Nevada Heritage Coalition thing for you? They cut ties. According to the state records, all of a sudden there’s no connection between the NHC and the McMillan Trade Group at all. The paper trail’s been destroyed, real names scrubbed from corporate charters and replaced with bogus ones. It’s a total burn job.”

“How?” I said. We walked into St. Jude’s, swapping the arid heat outside for the muggy, wet heat inside.

“Senator Roth has a hacker who’s as good as me,” she said. “Or better. No. Just as good. Maybe a little less.”

“Okay, I get the idea. I’ve got a lead, but I need help. Can you do some research for me?”

“Normally I’d make a comment about not being your personal Google,” she said. “But for this I’ll make an exception.”

We set up camp at an empty table, and she slid her laptop out of her backpack.

“Search for articles on, what was it called, Ausar Biomedical? From about twenty years ago, just before the big scandal. I’m looking for pictures of their research staff. Especially anyone named Nedry, Clark, or Bob.”

“Anyone named Bob?” Pixie said, arching an eyebrow. “Real specific there, Faust.”

I shrugged. “It’s what I’ve got to work with.”

It took her less than three minutes to hit pay dirt, pulling up an archived
Time
magazine article. The grainy scanned photo showed the three men standing side by side—all smiles, with Nedry still wearing his mirrored glasses—in the laboratory the smoke-faced men had showed me.

“The future’s so bright, they’ve got to wear shades,” the caption read. “Pictured: Dr. Francis Nedry, Dr. Noah Clark and Dr. Bob Payton of Ausar Biomedical, celebrating the FDA’s approval to begin human trials of the eagerly anticipated fertility drug Viridithol. Industry insiders have named Ausar as this year’s hot stock to watch.”

“Who are these guys?” Pixie said.

“The two on the left are serious bad news. It’s Payton I’m interested in. He was stabbed to death in a subway bathroom, probably not long after this picture was taken. I think—”

I paused, straining to remember the vision. It all felt so far away now, slipping from my memory like strands of gossamer. I’d seen the newspaper blow by, past a pillar, under a slate-gray sign…

“The Canarsie Line,” I said. “I think it’s in New York.”

Her fingers rattled the keyboard. She frowned.

“Correct on the location, but negative on the crime. I’ve got nothing even close to a men’s-room stabbing here. You sure that’s where he died?”

He is not dead
, they’d told me.
Find his grave, and you will see
.

“Try this,” I said. “Just look for an obituary or a burial notice for Payton. Forget the stabbing part.”

“This is now officially weird.” Pixie squinted at her screen. “You’re certain he was murdered?”

“Watched it happen.”

She turned, pushed her Buddy Holly glasses down on her nose, and stared at me over the rims.

“I wasn’t
there
there,” I said. “Forget it, it’s complicated. Why, what did you find?”

“No police record of his death, but he does have an obituary. It ran in the
Oakland Tribune
. Guess he was from around there originally. Talks about how he got his PhD from UC Berkeley and moved back to New York to get in on the ground floor with Ausar.”

“Does it say how he died?” I said, leaning in to read over her shoulder.

She shook her head. “Not a word. Just says he had no surviving family, no spouse or kids. He was interred at Sunset Rest in El Cerrito. What are you going to do, go dig him up?”

I didn’t answer right away. She looked over at me.

“Tell me,” she said, “you’re not going to go dig him up.”

“I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” I said, turning the pieces over in my mind. “There’s nothing buried there but an empty casket. The Ausar brain trust had a falling out just before the Viridithol scandal. Nedry and Clark tried to assassinate Bob Payton, but they didn’t stick around to see the aftermath. I think he survived the stabbing. He knew he was in over his head, and he faked his death and went into hiding so they wouldn’t take a second shot at him.”

“What difference does it make?” Pixie said. “What does this have to do with my missing people?”

“It’s all connected. Ausar Biomedical, Lauren Carmichael, Senator Roth, the missing people, all of it. Twenty years ago, Nedry, Clark, and Payton were messing with something they should have left alone. Now the experiments are starting again, bankrolled by Carmichael-Sterling and greased by Roth’s political influence. They’re all after the same thing.”

“What?” Pixie said.

I thought back to the prison cell and that mutated, twisted creature that had been an innocent man before Nedry went to work on him. The vision of Lauren descending into the tomb, its ancient stones bristling with grass and flowers made of flesh.

“Something terrible,” I said.

• • •

Two hundred bucks bought me a window seat on a jet to Oakland International. It was only an hour and a half away from Vegas, the kind of flight where you spend more time on the runway than you do in the air. I didn’t bring luggage.

I rented a little red Altima and set the GPS for Berkeley. I made it just in time to catch the sun setting over the San Francisco Bay, turning the cloudy sky and the clear water into sheets of hammered gold. My stomach was grumbling, so I headed for the Gourmet Ghetto on Shattuck and Vine, on the north side of town. Besides, I needed less light in the sky before I could take care of business.

I ended up at La Fable, a cute little bistro on Walnut Street, and sat under an umbrella on the patio with a menu in one hand and a whiskey sour in the other. The Bourbon whiskey, laced with lemon juice and sugar, went down with a smooth heat and helped me think. The strains of a jazz quartet drifted up from the street as the lights of the city—and out in the distance, the sprawl of San Francisco—blazed against the falling night.

Lauren and the science boys at Ausar were on the same mission. The linking element was Senator Roth. I wondered if they’d discovered their common interests when she bribed him into sending the feds after Nicky and decided to hitch their wagons together. The one thing I knew for certain was that Bob Payton wanted nothing to do with it. He’d created the smoke-faced men as some sort of antibody, a cure against what his old colleagues were planning, though it hadn’t done a hell of a lot of good. Given that they’d almost started the apocalypse, their idea of a cure was worse than the disease.

Payton could tell me what I wanted to know. And he would, once I got my hands on him. Down to every last detail.

I ordered the moules frites and switched to sparkling water for the rest of the meal. It was my old habit before a job from my days of working for Nicky: one stiff drink, then nothing but water. Just enough to get me limber but not sloppy.

The waitress brought me a plate of black-shelled mussels in a cream sauce, along with a side of fries. There’s nothing like fresh seafood, so juicy and tender you can smell the ocean salt with every bite. I idly stirred a fry in the mussel sauce and glanced at my watch, pacing myself. I was going in blind tonight. I hated going in blind.

Once I decided it was late enough and I’d had enough of mussels and jazz, I paid my check. El Cerrito was thirteen minutes north of Berkeley, most of it a straight shot along SR-123. I drove five miles over the speed limit and took my time.

I’d never broken into a cemetery before. There’s a first time for everything.

S
unset Rest was a one-stop shop for the dead. Wrought-iron fences curled along rolling lawns studded with monuments in marble and basalt, salt-and-pepper memorials to the fallen. Its sprawling chapel arch overlooked a tranquil pond. Tiled outcroppings and concealed pumps created perpetual miniature waterfalls that burbled in the dark. The polished granite walls of the mausoleum leaned in over the chapel’s shoulder, as if hungry for more bodies to stuff inside its endless niches.

Office hours ended at five, and the cemetery gates locked at sunset. Unless somebody was burning the midnight oil, I’d only have rent-a-cops to worry about. I parked the Altima on the street a block away and hopped the fence.

I moved low across the lawn, keeping it smooth and quiet. I didn’t expect a lot of resistance—professional grave robbing, as a career, was about a hundred years past its sell-by date—but I figured they’d have a few uniforms on the grounds keeping a lookout for kids and vandals.

The strobe of a distant flashlight caught my eye, and I got down fast, crouching in the grass behind a chiseled marble plinth. I peeked around the edge. Just one guy, strolling along and oblivious to the world, swinging his flashlight in time with the music pumping through his earbuds.

Private security could be tricky. A lot of these guys used to be on the job, and they still had cop instincts under the starched uniforms and cheap shoes. Any hired guard had an inherent weakness, though, and that was boredom. When you’re pulling a graveyard shift keeping watch over a place nobody in their right mind would want to break into, walking the same uneventful route for the fiftieth time that night, you become your own worst enemy pretty fast.

The guard strolled right past my hiding spot, singing under his breath. I gave him another ten feet and then darted past him behind his back. From there it was smooth sailing all the way to the chapel, where I skirted the edge of the burbling pond and let the tiny waterfalls cover the sound of my footsteps on the concrete walkway.

Finding the administrative office wasn’t hard. I just circled the building and peeped in windows as I went until I found a room with a tiny desk and enough filing cabinets to please the world’s most obsessive organizer. Getting in, that was the problem. The window was latched tight, and a telltale alarm cord ran from the base of the windowsill on the inside.

Another flashlight up ahead. This one sagged toward the ground. I got behind a tree and watched his movements, trying to work out his pattern. He headed for the chapel doors.

I crept along behind him, quieter this time. This guard was an older guy with a hangdog face and a comb-over, and he wasn’t wearing any headphones to block out the sound of my approach. I hovered at the edge of the chapel’s outside fluorescents, a shadow at the border of a blob of white light, and watched as he fumbled at his key ring and got the doors unlocked. He disappeared inside.

That was my way in, but it wasn’t a clean approach. There weren’t any windows up front. If he was standing in the foyer or anywhere within earshot of the front door, he’d spot me the second I came inside. I stayed still as a statue and silently counted down from fifteen. As soon as I hit zero I dashed across the lit walkway and up to the chapel door, turning the heavy brass handle and slipping through.

Faint safety lights painted the chapel gloom in shades of Christmas red. I kept my ears sharp and ducked behind a wooden pew, taking a few heartbeats to get my bearings. Clunky shoes slapped on ceramic tile on the left side of the chapel, on the far side of an open arch. I crouch-walked around the pews, keeping my head down.

A flashlight beam roved across the room, careful and slow. I froze.

The beam snapped away, and the shoes trudged toward the chapel doors. I didn’t move until I heard the door click shut and the sound of keys rattling, locking me in.

Just a wolf alone in the henhouse.

I clicked on a small desk lamp in the administrative office and aimed its green plastic hood toward the filing cabinets. I wished I’d brought a penlight to minimize the chance of anyone outside noticing the glow from the window. I’d just have to work fast.

I ignored the computer on the desk. Probably password protected, and any place that put their records on a hard drive didn’t need twelve overstuffed filing cabinets. I tossed the place as quickly as I could, moving from cabinet to cabinet, rolling out each drawer and running my fingertips along the labeled folders until I’d seen enough to move on. I found what I was looking for about halfway through: sales receipts.