Bitter Waters (26 page)

Rennie caught Ukiah's chain of thought.
“You're right. That's why they sat and waited after killing him. They were waiting to see if his pieces became mice.”

“It would be a witch hunt of the worse kind,” Bridget said.

“Yes, it would.” Ukiah attempted to drag the conversation back on track. “Alicia, in the mine, where exactly are the Ae stored? What's the company name they're stored under?”

“They're behind a red door.” Alicia started as only herself. “The letters E-44 are on the door. The guards took us to it and unlocked it.” She slid into Hex's recall. “
I
dislike that they have the keys, but they have needs that can't be circumvented. It is a worrisome thing, this moving through the herds of hosts, needing to trust that they stay within their algorithms, especially knowing that often they don't. I touch the madness, over and over again; the disease that took Prime and twisted him so, but there is no understanding it. Salmon will all swim upriver to spawn. Sheep will blindly follow goats and do nothing more than eat and reproduce. Why is man so erratic?”

“What name is it stored under?” Rennie pressed. “What name did you give to the guards?”

It was the second question that produced, “Omega Pharmaceuticals.”

“Damn unimaginative bastards,” Rennie muttered. “Do you use passwords to get in? What do you say to the guards to pass? Or did you have IDs from the dummy company?”

“I used a password. I wanted no trail leading back, no key to be stolen, no paperwork to block me.”

“What's the password?”

“I am Hex.”

 

They could not get the name of the storage facility. Alicia became agitated at her own inability to produce it, but Hex hadn't thought of the name, nor glanced at anything bearing the name on the one set of memories Alicia had access to. Bridget thought it best to stop there, despite the fact that Rennie ached to ask a thousand questions, ranging over a hundred
years or more. Ukiah delayed, verifying first that the Ontongard had laid no traps, or split the Ae up at some earlier date. Everything Hex had taken off the scout ship was stored deep within the mountainside, guarded only by unknowing humans.

Rennie bullied Ukiah into taking a cup of cocoa and eating two of the scones as Bridget brought Alicia up out of the hypnosis. The Pack leader also poured out tea for Bridget and Alicia without taking anything for himself. Alicia took the cup from Rennie with a thin, tight smile.

“Do your mothers know all this?” Bridget asked Ukiah.

“Yes. We found out most of it in June.”

“What does this have to do with your son?”

“I don't know.”

“We're going to find out,” Rennie promised. “Let's go, Cub.”

Ukiah set down his empty cup and thanked Bridget. Starr met them at the back door, a sheet of paper in hand. “Here. I drew this while you talked. I thought your moms might like to have it.”

Starr had drawn him in profile, surrounded by the trees. A bear rose out of the shadows, looming over him.

“Why the bear?” Ukiah asked, trying to be casual.

“There are spirits that guide and protect us,” Starr said. “I get a feeling that yours is a bear.”

Bennett Detective Agency, Shadyside, Pennsylvania
Thursday, September 16, 2004

Rennie drove back to the offices while Ukiah sat in the front passenger seat, using the Cherokee's deck to search the Internet for storage companies. While he pulled up a daunting number of hits, he quickly discovered his query was picking up self-storage businesses located aboveground, and geological information on Pennsylvanian mines.

“I'm not sure how close to Pittsburgh the mine was.” In the backseat, Alicia had her eyes closed as she searched her memories. “It might have been Philadelphia area or Johnstown, but it felt like southwestern Pennsylvania.”

“It's going to take a while to weed through this.” Ukiah checked the next hit. “I'm assuming that it has a Web site; anything that secure is going to be a fairly large operation.”

“I'll hit the library,” Alicia volunteered, glancing at her wristwatch. “It should be open by now. I'll go through their yellow page collection and pull storage facilities for all of Pennsylvania, just to cover all bases.”

Rennie glanced into the rearview mirror at Alicia, eyes still closed, looking inward. Whatever the Pack leader was thinking, he carefully buried it out of Ukiah's reach.

 

Max had left him a note to check his voice-mail messages—operating on mid-range paranoia level. Sam and Max had questioned Zlotnikov's next of kin, but Max went on to
say that on the surface, at least, none of it was useful. Zlotnikov had spent a childhood on Polish Hill and moved late in his teens to Butler. The move had changed a boy on the social fringe to a total outcast, but he had lucked into a friendship with a popular son of a local minister. It was, his mother said, the start of his religious interest. After high school, the group splintered, the members scattering into different colleges. Zlotnikov himself had tried college, and failed out. He returned to live in her basement, being fired from a series of jobs. “This kid was on a downward spiral. What's left in his bedroom makes him look like the Unabomber. I'd hate to see what he took with him.”

After high school, as his friendships became solely Internet-based, his mother lost track of who he talked to. Over time, he became more secretive, and then he disappeared altogether. She had been stunned to discover he was in the area when he died as she hadn't heard from him for several years.

“She gave me the names of his high school friends,” Max added. “We're going to do an early lunch and then see if any of them know anything.”

Speaking of lunch, Ukiah raided the refrigerator to fortify his wounded body, put the teakettle on the cooktop, and settled at his desk. He struggled to refine his search. After several false starts, he stumbled across a newspaper story on the national archive of photographs. It stated the archive had been moved to an old limestone mine in western Pennsylvania, in a high-tech, high-security, state-of-the-art environmental storage facility used by libraries, national companies, banks, and the film industry. The writer didn't give the facility's name, as he had been asked to stay discreet in the matters of location, actual clients, and security measures. Ukiah redefined his search and found the company name, and then their Web site. Out of habit of working with Max, he wrote out the contact information.

As the teakettle started to whistle, the doorbell chimed. He switched directions to cautiously answer the door.

Indigo waited at the door with all the icy stillness of a glacier.

“What's wrong?”

“It's just as well that Goodman's dead,” she said in a completely neutral voice that sucked the warmth out of the air. “Otherwise I might have killed him myself.”

Ukiah blinked at the statement. He had never seen her so furiously cold before; he wasn't sure what to do about it. There was a tension to her that suggested that hugging her was a bad idea; she was too angry to be cuddled. Yet, that she was here, at the door, indicated that she needed something from him. The teakettle continued its long whistle, so he said, “Come in. I was just going to make hot cocoa. You can make a cup of tea, and we'll talk.”

Silently they made their drinks. He made an expensive instant hot cocoa that Max stocked the offices with, while she selected Earl Grey tea, pouring the hot water over the tea bag. Ukiah got out the honey, added it to his cocoa for a calorie kick, and set it beside her. She pulled the tea bag out of her cup when the water was dark, added a dollop of honey, stirred, and took her first sip before breaking the silence.

“Eve met Goodman at Monroeville Mall,” Indigo said. “She had gone alone and he started to stalk her, touching her. She thought he was creepy at first, and was going to report him to the guards, but then he started to look ‘kind of hot' to her. Later, he told her that he used the breeding drug on her, stroking it onto her bare skin until she was desperately aroused. By the end of the evening, she went out to his car and let him molest her. He told her everything a love-starved child wants to hear, while dousing her with more of the drug. She'd done heavy petting with boys her age, but the drug made it glorious.”

Indigo took a sip of her tea, her eyes growing colder with controlled rage. “She bragged to me how clever it was of him to drug her like that, to pervert her will until she begged him for intercourse, let him do anything he wanted to her. Eve went on and on about how wonderful Goodman had been, while the doctors found evidence of his abuse, everything from using sharp objects to sodomizing her to branding his name on her.

“He twisted her until she thinks pain is love. Every
relationship she'll seek out will be like this one, trying to recapture it.”

Ukiah struggled to see Indigo's view of this. Yes, Eve was pitiful, but he knew with horrible clarity what she had done to Kittanning. That she acted not out of fear for her life, but simply to show her love of Goodman merely made both of the kidnappers contemptible to Ukiah. No. He couldn't forgive her. “She'll be going to prison, won't she?”

Indigo glanced at him, but whatever she thought of his lack of feeling was masked by the icy calm she held herself in. “With two babies dead and the others still missing, the district attorney is pushing to have her tried as an adult. Her fingerprints were found in all five stolen cars, so that alone will get her convicted of grand theft and kidnapping. She claims that she and Goodman handed the babies over to Billy alive, and so far there's no evidence linking her or Goodman to the murders, so she might not be charged with homicide.”

Ukiah could only think that this Billy Bob now had Kittanning. “Any info on Billy Bob?”

“No,” Indigo said. “The prison hasn't been able to establish an identity for him yet.” She sipped her tea, staring into nothing. “Seeing what Goodman has done with this girl makes me question my own actions.”

“What do you mean?”

“Aren't I guilty of the same thing, of seducing a child? You only had eight years of living with people, and I knew it. I should never have seduced you.”

“It's not the same.”

“Because I'm not a man? I've seen the walls of the farmhouse. A woman tortured Goodman when he was a child.”

“You don't torture me,” Ukiah said, and picked her up. “And in case you haven't noticed lately, I'm fully capable of defending myself.”

“Ukiah!” She yipped and squirmed in his hold. “Hey. You can't deny that you were a virgin.”

“And I was supposed to stay a virgin the rest of my life?”

“I just jumped you. I didn't even ask if you liked me.”

“If I remember correctly, and generally I do, I had bought you a present and gave it to you before you jumped me.”

“The wolf fetish.”

“Yes.” He kissed her. “Trust me, I was raised by wolves; I knew what males did with females. I wanted to kiss you. I wanted to take off all your clothes and explore all your nooks and crannies.”

She giggled, a surprising sound out of her. “Okay, okay, I was being overly sensitive about the issue. Hey, what are you doing?”

Ukiah had started across the room, kissing her as he carried her toward the back steps. “Oh, I think I should give you a full demonstration of my physical prowess.”

“Ukiah, I don't have time for this!”

“We'll just have to be quick, then!” He raced up the steps with her giggling and slapping his chest.

While there was nothing fragile about Indigo—under the silk suit was all muscle—she was still a small woman. Their sex was usually a dance between equals. This time he put his strength to use, supporting her in gymnastic positions. They ended, however, with her sitting on his chest, pinning him lightly, slick with sweat and glowing.

“Okay, Wolf Boy, you've made your point.” She smiled down at him. “And I'm going to be sooo late, and I haven't told you everything I found out.”

“Oops.” He winced, only slightly repentant. For the first time since touching Goodman's poisoned wall mural, he felt at his normal sharpness. “Did Eve tell you where Goodman got the Invisible Red?”

“She didn't call it Invisible Red.” Indigo gave him one last kiss before letting him up. “She called it Blissfire, and said it made the sex so good that you felt like you were going to go up in flames. Goodman got it off of Billy, last name still unknown.”

“Are we sure it was Billy that killed Goodman and took Kittanning?”

“Yes.” Indigo ran warm water into the sink to wash up. “Goodman told her to hide, so she went upstairs. She could hear them talking. Goodman seemed to be making excuses as to why he hadn't turned Kittanning over. She gave us an
impressive list of guns that Goodman had, but apparently he went out to talk to Billy with only Kittanning in hand.”

“There were no guns in the house.”

“When we find Billy, he's going to be well armed.” Indigo rinsed out the washcloth that she had been using and handed it to him. “She heard someone yell, ‘What are you hiding in the house?' and a fight start. That's when she jumped out the window and crawled away.”

“He protected her?”

“It seems like it.” Indigo started to dress. “She wants to believe he did. She heard them kill him, but she doesn't seem to realize what she heard yet. To her, it was the sound of men hitting pumpkins with baseball bats.”

He wondered about screams, and then remembered that Goodman had been gagged with an apple. “She told us that Billy was Goodman's prison bitch. I wonder if the relationship was as abusive as the one he had with Eve.”

Indigo stilled, and he regretted bringing the conversation back to that point. “No,” she finally said quietly. “Eve was quite proud of the fact that she was a better bitch for Goodman. In prison, he definitely topped Billy, but Billy grew claws and a backbone after being released. The relationship flipped, so Billy was the user, and Goodman was the used, and he didn't like that. Eve, Kittanning, and the ransom were all part of Goodman's plan to ditch Billy and buy a place in Florida.”

“So Billy went through a radical personality change?” Ukiah rinsed out the washcloth and hung it up to dry.

“As far as Goodman was concerned, yes,” Indigo said. “I tried to sound out if Billy had been infected by the Ontongard. Since Goodman kept Eve hidden from Billy, it's very difficult to judge, but I don't think he has been. You say that Invisible Red is inert in Gets, and apparently Billy and his friends use it to engage in orgies.”

“Ontongard don't have sex, with or without Invisible Red.”

“Exactly.”

Ukiah frowned as he dressed. She came to stand in front of
him until he realized she was there. He wrapped his arms around her and nuzzled into her.

“What are you thinking?” She ran her fingers through his long black hair.

“These machines are not so much complex as obscure. The Ontongard never have anything like an instruction manual; they only have machines that they all know how to operate.”

“And?”

“As Rennie says, humans are clever little monkeys. I wonder—did some humans find these machines and figure them out?”

 

If Rennie had returned prior to Indigo's departure, he stayed out of sight and out of mind until she drove away. Moments later, though, Rennie rumbled down the street and into the driveway; seemingly too well timed to be coincidence.

“I think this is the one.” Ukiah showed Rennie the name of the storage facility: Iron Mountain. “It seems the closest match to the level of security that Alicia talked about.”

“If she was telling the truth.”

“You think she lied while under hypnosis?”

“It does not sit well that two days after Hex's reclaimed Get returns to Pittsburgh that a breeder is kidnapped.”

“Alicia's human,” Ukiah said. “She's back to the person I know, and that person wouldn't have helped steal Kittanning away.”

“How can we know what permanent mark being a Get left on her? What if we've made some accidental hybrid with a human's ability to act and lie but with a Get's morals?”

It was a terrifying thought, but he rejected the possibility. “No, she's not acting. I've known her too long. She's herself—a good deal bruised, but not corrupted.”