Bloodletting (30 page)

"That can't be all. Surely they would have updated their system after buying the place, especially if they're doing things in there they don't want anyone else to see."

"You seem to think they want to keep us out."

"I don't follow."

"They've all but rolled out the red carpet for us here. Dodge a couple cameras, clip some wires, and we're inside."

"It's too easy."

"That's just it," Hawthorne said. "They know we're coming and they want us to make it in there."

"If they know we're here, why would they allow us to enter the compound?"

Hawthorne stopped on the path. Carver turned at the diminished sound of footsteps. Their eyes locked.

"I don't know."

Carver imagined that was the first time Hawthorne had ever used that particular combination of words.

Chapter Six

Morality is the herd-instinct of the individual.

-- Friedrich Nietzche, Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft, III, 116

I

Monroe, Washington

Carver finally thought he was beginning to understand. All along he had been approaching the investigation from the perspective that he was trying to coordinate solving two distinct cases, trying to put a face to a perpetrator, to collar a monster, but that was like trying to bleed a body to death through the capillaries in a fingertip. The girls in Colorado and the mummified corpses in Arizona were offshoots of a larger artery, which had to be cut deep and in such a way as to release copious quantities of blood fast enough to drain every last ounce of life before the wound could heal. They could attack the smallest branches farthest from the heart as long as they wanted, but would only cause superficial damage, inflicting lacerations that would close far too quickly, abrasions of no real consequence outside of wasting precious time. They were all confident that Dreck-Windham was the heart and HydroGen the aorta. There were too many pieces of corroborating evidence to ignore, least of which were the snakehead retrovirus, the direct link to Schwartz, and the death of Kajika's father to facilitate the sale of the company and send a grieving son back to the land where at least eleven bodies were buried, just waiting to be found.

Carver knew it was an elaborate setup, and the amount of energy expended in its execution frightened him. They had been led to find the byproducts of the retrovirus, but not the active virus itself. The twins abducted thirty years prior had been gathered together in the process and brought back within range of the monster from whom they'd been hidden during the intervening years. They were facing one of the world's largest pharmaceutical conglomerates with the distribution channels to potentially ship the virus into every home around the globe. He was in way over his head and he knew it. The way he saw it, there were still several crucial questions that needed to be answered. What did Heidlmann intend to do with the virus? Who did he plan to infect and what was the mode of transmission? Why had the twins who had been left behind while Heidlmann absconded with the others been summoned back to the same place at the same time? And the question he seemed least capable of answering: why was
he
there?

He was the outsider in their midst, the weak link. He felt like a child as they held his hand and guided him through an investigation they had solved long ago. Why did they really need him? He was a good agent, but far from being the best. He could handle himself in a pinch and had solid investigative instincts, but there were others with sharper skills and far more experience. It couldn't have merely been because of his past relationship with Ellie...could it? There had to be more to it than that. The truth was a speck of dust in his mind. The harder he tried to grab it, the faster it blew away.

They checked into a Holiday Inn in Monroe, seventeen miles northeast along the Skykomish River from the HydroGen complex. It would have been far more discreet to stay in any of the million hotels surrounding the Pike Place Market on the main tourist drag in Seattle, but Hawthorne was convinced they could be found wherever they stayed, and thus opted for proximity. Besides, there were only ten hours remaining until they went in, ten hours to see if Carver could figure out what kind of trap they were preparing to spring.

And he hadn't the faintest clue.

They chose two rooms on the southwest side of the hotel from which they could barely see the blue glimmer of the river through the gray mist crawling over the hillside. The stairs from the third floor down to the parking lot were right in front of the rooms, the elevator a short jaunt around the corner to the left. They left the doors open between the adjoining suites and settled uncomfortably into the generic, cramped spaces.

Carver used the opportunity to try calling Jack, but again only reached his voice mail. The lack of response was beginning to make him nervous. It was possible Jack had risen early and used the extra time to try to track down more information and was now outside of cell range. He preferred that line of thought to the nagging doubts kicking around in the back of his head. If anything had happened to Jack, he would never be able to forgive himself.

Marshall had answered on the first ring with little new to share. He was still plugging the pictures Manning had sent him into his facial reconstruction program, but had thus far made no new matches. He promised to call if anything turned up.

Manning hadn't been much more helpful. She sounded overburdened with the task at hand and in desperate need of a good night's sleep, but she had given him the news he had expected to hear at some point. She had just hung up with the forensics lab in Phoenix . The techs had been unable to lift any viable fingerprints from the scalpel used to behead Mondragon. They were now in the process of determining if there was any foreign DNA mixed with Mondragon's blood, but she didn't hold out much hope. And with as much forensic evidence as she was dumping on the lab team by the truckload, she didn't expect to hear back from them anytime soon. She agreed to call with any new developments and asked that he do the same.

Carver felt as though they had reached a standstill. He needed something to occupy his mind in a way that sitting around a hotel room couldn't.

"How long is the drive to Portland from here?" he asked no one in particular.

"About three hours," Kajika said. "Why?"

Hawthorne looked up from where he had already set up his laptop on the circular table with what could have passed for curiosity on his face.

"You want to rattle some cages?" he asked.

"If you're right, and they know we're here, what harm could it possibly do?"

Hawthorne turned the laptop so Carver could see the screen. It displayed the Dreck-Windham home page. He was in the midst of the virtual tour of the corporate headquarters.

"I guess that means we're on the same wavelength," Carver said.

"So who's staying to babysit?" Locke asked.

"I figured we'd all go," Carver said, but immediately realized the flaw in that line of thought. They'd be walking straight into the lion's den, a risk they all didn't need to take.

"Ellie and Kajika will be safe here," Wolfe said. "We're taking a chance as it is."

"Leaving them doesn't guarantee their safety. If we're right and they know we're here, they could be coming after us as we speak."

"You saw for yourself," Hawthorne said. "They want us to get inside HydroGen. It doesn't make sense to try anything here at the hotel in broad daylight."

"Nothing they've done so far makes sense."

"So one of us stays here to stand guard," Wolfe said.

"I'll do it," Carver said.

"The hell you will," Hawthorne said. "This is your investigation. Locke can handle it."

"You're kidding, right?" Locke said.

Hawthorne shot him a look that answered his question.

"If there's one person equipped to handle any contingency," Hawthorne said, "it's Locke."

"I should stay," Carver said. He had promised to keep Ellie at his side at all times.

"I'm sure we'll be fine," Ellie said. "Just go handle this situation so we can all go back to our normal lives."

She offered a reassuring smile and gave his hand a squeeze. Carver looked from one agent to the next. The decision had obviously already been made.

* * *

Thirty minutes later they were headed south on I-5 in one of the Caprices. Wolfe drove and Hawthorne rode shotgun, his laptop where it was designed to be used. Carver slouched in the back seat, listening as Hawthorne rattled off every fact he could find regarding the corporate structure of Dreck-Windham and its holdings. Locke had stayed at the hotel with Ellie and Kajika. Leaving Ellie didn't sit well with Carver, but walking her through the enemy's front door was sheer idiocy. They would be in and out in no time regardless.

He realized he had tuned Hawthorne out and forced himself to pay attention.

"Avram Dreck was born in Salzburg, Austria in 1938," Hawthorne said. "He emigrated to England with his parents following the end of World War II. Three post-graduate degrees in various disciplines of biochemistry later and he moved to the United States. That was 1968."

"The same year Korolenko died," Wolfe said.

"He worked for Jervis Pharmaceuticals in Boston until they were acquired by another conglomerate in 1973. Shortly thereafter, he founded his own company with Edward Windham, another former Jervis employee with old New England money. Windham died of a stroke in 1979, but his name remains as something of a feel-good tribute."

"'79 was when the twins were abducted, correct?" Carver asked.

"Could be coincidence. People die every day. Young and old alike."

"Do you believe that?"

"I believe we need to have a talk with Mr. Dreck."

"Do you really think we can just walk right in there and find him sitting in his office?"

"Stranger things have happened," Wolfe said.

"Anything else on him?"

"He donates a ton of money to local and global charities," Hawthorne said. "Makes sure Windham's surviving family receives a salary matching his own. Increasing revenues every quarter. Delighted shareholders. Happy employees with benefit packages including more annual paid vacation than I've ever seen, excellent health insurance, full tuition reimbursement, and daycare assistance."

"Is he hiring?" Wolfe asked.

Hawthorne glared at him. If Wolfe noticed, he didn't seem to care.

"Sounds too good to be true," Carver said.

"My thoughts exactly," Hawthorne said. "But this is all PR press release garbage. That's the whole point."

"Is there a picture of him?"

Hawthorne tapped the mouse button a couple of times and held up the screen. Carver leaned forward and stared at an old man in an expensive suit. His white hair was so thin on top it did little to conceal the liver spots on his balding pate. He had ears that proved they never stopped growing. The wrinkles on his face were the kind that provided character. His eyes were a sharp shade of blue that gave the impression of unerring focus. The gold necktie was bunched under his chin, hiding whatever loose flesh gathered on his stumpy neck.

"Look familiar at all?" Hawthorne asked.

"Yeah," Carver said, but for the life of him, he couldn't remember where he'd seen the man before.

II

Sinagua Ruins

36 Miles Northeast of Flagstaff, Arizona

The sun wasted no time in the desert. Sweat trickled down Manning's back between her shoulder blades. She shifted uneasily to blot it with her shirt. There was even a layer of sweat under her latex gloves, making them feel as though they were slowly tightening. She wiped the dampness from her brow with her forearm and tried to concentrate, despite feeling like she was being baked alive.

The body lying on its side before her was now her sixth exhumation. They had all started to blend together, so she had begun talking out loud in an attempt to commit to memory what her notes would hopefully jog later, though she was so tired she didn't even consciously hear the words. Her throat, however, was definitely parched enough to attest that she was indeed doing so.

This most recent corpse was undeniably female. Manning could clearly see the raisin-sacs of breasts under her arms, which had created a small gap between the thorax and thighs as they had deflated. Her ribs and spine appeared intact, as did the dorsal aspect of her pelvis and her femora. It helped that Manning could clearly see their form through the parchment skin. The patellae appeared laterally displaced, a consequence of forcing the knees to bend while the tendons were taut with rigor mortis. Both tibiae and fibulae were anatomically aligned, the feet curled under like a bird's claws trying to grasp a branch. The woman's right shoulder had been dislocated in the process of folding her arms under her legs, but other than that, she was structurally intact from the neck down. Of course, all of her abdominal viscera had been removed, leaving a small cavity that a crisp, long-dead tarantula had once made its home, filling it with deteriorating webs into which there was no way in hell she was going to reach.

The head was a different story. There was a depressed fracture of the occipital bone at the base of her skull, suggesting an acute, blunt impact from behind and slightly to the right, causing a tear in the skin through which the black dissolution of the brain stem had seeped and all variety of bugs had entered. She shined her penlight inside and they flooded out onto the woman's black-dyed hair.

Manning scrabbled to her feet and somehow managed to keep from shrieking. Her skin tingled as though covered with miniature legs. No amount of brushing or slapping herself was going to deaden the sensation. She needed air and time for whatever multi-legged creatures wriggled over the remains to find themselves a new home.