F Paul Wilson - Novel 04 (34 page)

John sat at the other end, staring
out at the backyard as the morning sun poured through the windows, enveloping
him without warming him. Two people in the same room, connected by ties of blood
and nothing else.

Bright light and estrangement.
Edward Hopper would have jumped on the scene.

But that was only the surface.

In truth, he and his mother had
commiserated for so long into the night, shared so much pain, that sheer
emotional and physical exhaustion demanded they withdraw into themselves for a
while.

Down time.

What had been the purpose of making
him go to the Maryland House last night? A cruel joke? This whole nightmare had
started out seeming purely political—get Tom out of the White House—but
now it had taken on an almost personal tone. What had they accomplished besides
torturing him?

And it had been torture,
unremitting agony hanging around that rest stop, scrutinizing every traveler
hurrying to the bathrooms or buying a yogurt, hating everyone who used a phone
in case the kidnappers might be trying to call on one of them.

And with each passing hour, his
hope fading, progressing from growing uncertainty to devastating conviction
that Katie wasn’t coming back to him.

And he’d been so sure. That
woman who’d called had seemed genuinely concerned about Katie. Had she
changed her mind? Or worse—one person connected with the plot was already
dead… had something else gone wrong?

And even if something hadn’t,
even if Katie and this woman were sitting safe and sound in another house in
another town, Katie had no Tegretol.

The pill count from the bottle
found in Falls Church showed only a few missing. John sighed. One more thing
he’d kept from Nana, but it yawned before him like a bottomless pit:
Right now, as they sat here in their desolate cocoons, Katie could be having a
seizure.

The phone rang and John leapt to
get it. Good news? Bad news? No news? The phone had become a loaded weapon;
answering it, placing it to his ear, a form of Russian roulette.

“Good news, Doc. I
think.” Bob Decker’s voice. John guessed he was supposed to ask who
was talking if he didn’t recognize it. Decker tended to be deficient in
the social amenities, but John appreciated his no-nonsense approach.

“You
‘think’?”

“Yeah. It’s about the
toe.” Decker seemed a little unsure, and that couldn’t be good.
John glanced at his mother who had straightened in her chair, listening. He
waved off her questioning look and covered the receiver.

“Just an update,” he
told her. “Nothing new.” She still didn’t know about the toe.
He wanted to keep it than way.

As casually as he could, he
stretched the phone cord and slipped around the corner into the hall. Then he
leaned against the wall, bracing himself.

“What about it?”

“It’s not your
daughter’s.”

“What?” John
didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “How… ? I
don’t…”

“Damnedest thing. I’ve
already been on the phone twice to the Bureau crime lab. They say the toe you
gave us is full of embalming fluid.”

“Embalming?” He had to
keep his voice low—a whisper. “But there was fresh blood. I saw
it.”

“That’s right. And the
type matches your daughter’s, but—”

“Wait. How do you know her
blood type?”

“Her hospital
records—when she had that head injury.”

“Oh. Right.” Of course
they’d have done an in-depth background check on Katie, trying to find
out everything about her.

“Anyway, the lab is a hundred
percent certain the blood on the toe didn’t come from the toe. That
toe’s been dead for days.”

John took a breath. Thank God
he’d spoken to Katie yesterday. If he hadn’t, he’d be
convinced right now that she was dead.

“This makes no sense!”

“Tell me about it. But it
gets weirder. The toe belongs to a little boy.”

“A boy? How on earth did they
figure that out?”

“Did some DNA thing. Found a
Y chromosome.”

John tried to slow his whirling
thoughts, tried to snatch bits of coherency from the maelstrom.

A Y chromosome; females
didn’t have one, so the toe couldn’t be Katie’s.

“There’s no
mistake?” John said.

“That’s what I’m
told. The lab boys say they’ve checked and rechecked: double X on the
blood, but the cells of the toe itself are XY.”

John bit his lip. He wanted to
pound the wall and shout. But confusion blunted his relief.

Why send a dead boy’s toe?
The kidnappers were obviously murderous thugs—the bloody corpse in the Falls
Church house was testament to that—and yet they’d sent a bogus toe
rather than cut off Katie’s…

“Any of this make sense to
you. Doc?”

“No. I can’t
imagine…”

“Neither can I. Are you sure
you can’t help us out on this?”

“What do you mean?”

“Anything you haven’t
told us?”

John stiffened. Did they suspect
that he’d been contacted? Had they followed him last night? He was
tempted to tell Decker about speaking to Katie yesterday, but the woman had
been worried about being caught. Suppose someone on Decker’s team had
followed him and scared her off?

Damn you if that’s true, he
thought. I might not get another chance.

“No. I told you everything I
knew. And I haven’t heard a word from Snake.” That much at least
was true.

A pause before Decker responded.
“All right. But let us know the instant you hear anything. Every little
scrap is important.”

“Of course. But what happens
next?”

“I meet with our little task
force in about an hour. I’ll keep you informed.”

As John hung up, he wondered: Was
it just his imagination, or had Decker put extra emphasis on the
“you?” Who gave a good goddamn? He was worried about Katie. Where
was she? What were they doing to her?

“But I want to go home! I
want to see my Daddy!” Poppy watched Katie’s lower lip push out.
She looked like she was going to cry. Poppy couldn’t bear the thought
that she’d caused that.

“You will, honey,” she
said, giving Katie a one-armed hug. “It’s like I told you: You fell
asleep last night and I didn’t want to wake you. But you know what?
We’ll call him again today and you can talk to him. Okay?” Katie nodded.

“ ‘Kay.”

“Great. How you
feeling?”

“Fine.”

The poor little thing had had a bit
of a Valium hangover this morning. Good thing Katie had been zonked out last
night because after getting into bed beside her, Poppy had got to thinking
about Paulie, and Katie would have had to listen to a ton of crying. Paulie was
like the best thing that ever happened to her. And now he was dead. And it was
her fault because she’d got him to break Mac’s rules. If
she’d kept her damn mouth shut…

But then what would have happened
to Katie? Why couldn’t life be simple?

Yeah, well, maybe it could have
been simple if they hadn’t got involved with Mac.

She’d clung to Katie all
night. Poppy didn’t know how she’d have made it to the morning
without her.

Dawn had broken gray and cloudy,
but they’d both perked up after a stack of waffles at the Denny’s
across the highway. And now, back in the room, she wished she could find some
cartoons to distract Katie, but the tube was like totally filled with talking
heads, and if they weren’t blabbing about legalized drugs they were
speculating about like why the President was in the hospital.

As if anybody cared.

“How come your hands are all
red?” Katie said.

Poppy looked down at her hands.
Black fingernails and blood-red fingers.

Very weird.

She stood and stepped toward the
window. “C’mere and I’ll show you.” She pulled back the
curtain. “Check out the truck.”

Katie pressed her face against the
window. “It’s red!”

“Sure is. Did it myself last
night.”

She’d pulled the truck around
the back of the motel and parked near a storage shed. There, out of sight of
pretty much the whole parking lot, she’d emptied like can after can of
spray paint. Her fingers still ached from pressing those nozzles. Sure as hell
wasn’t pretty, but anyone scanning the freeways for a white panel truck
would probably skip right over this one. She hoped.

Poppy dropped the curtain and
turned back to the motel room. They couldn’t stay here. She’d
charged it on Mac’s bogus plastic, thinking he was dead. But Mac
wasn’t dead. And what if he had a way to trace her through the card?

They had to get out of here.

But first they had to make some
changes.

“Good,” Poppy said.
“Let’s play a game, then. How about”—she made a show of
trying to decide—“oh, I don’t know… how about a game of
let’s pretend?” Katie’s pout of a moment ago seemed to be
history.

“What are we going to
pretend?”

“Let’s see… why
don’t we pretend we’re boys? Won’t that be fun?”

“Boys?” Katie
didn’t seem to be too sure about how much fun that would be. “How
do we do that?”

“It’s easy. We change
our hair and change our clothes and we act dumb. You know…” Poppy
made a face. “Duh.”

Katie laughed. “Duh!
That’s easy.”

“But we gotta look like
boys.”

A wider grin. “You mean dress
in boy clothes?”

“Right! And cutting our
hair.”

The smile vanished as Katie’s
hands darted to her hair. “Cut my hair? Oh, I don’t—”

“Yeah, we’ll cut it,
color it, comb it different. This’ll be the most fun we’ve ever
had!”

But Katie still wasn’t
buying.

She has to buy it. Poppy thought.
I’ve changed the color of the truck, and I’m going to change
license plates and change motels, but if we’re both going to get through
this in one piece, I’ve got to change us.

She’d stopped at a Giant
Foods on the way back from Denny’s and picked up all the necessary
materials. Now she had to sell Katie.

“Look,” she said,
grabbing a pair of scissors. “I’ll go first.” She grabbed a
fistful of her own hair and began cutting.

Dan Keane sat stiffly in his chair
in the cramped back office of W-16 and listened with growing horror as Gerry
Canney updated the task force on the latest developments from the FBI Crime
Lab.

“And here’s the latest
finding: two different types of blood on the carpet in the Falls Church house.
Both fresh. One belongs to the dead man, Dicastro. The other is unidentified,
but it is definitely not Katie Vanduyne’s.”

Everything’s unraveling, he
thought. He wanted to flee the room.

Decker took over. “Okay. Now,
in the U.K. Jim says he’s found the guy who runs the anonymous remailer
Snake’s been using.” Jim Lewis cleared his throat. “His
name’s Steve Fletcher but he refuses to tell us where he hides his
computer. The easiest solution would be to follow him to it and steal it. Then
we run through his hard drive to find Snake’s e-mail address.
Snake’s got to have an account with an online service or a private server
to get on the Internet, and we track him through that. But stealing the CPU
would shut down the remailer service and cut off communication from Snake. So
we’re working with British Intelligence to pressure Fletcher into giving
up the information. If it looks like there’s going to be too much red
tape, we have other options.”

“Like what?” Decker
said.

“I’ll get into that
when and if.”

Dan steadied himself. If they can
trace this Snake to Salinas, we’re screwed.

Decker nodded. “Fair
enough.” He turned to Dan. “And finally, what’s DEA
got?” Dan licked his dry lips. Truth was, he’d gone through some
motions but hadn’t done much of anything. But he couldn’t tell
Decker that.

“We’ve got all our ears
open. I wasn’t specific about kidnapping or assassination plots, but I
put the word through to check all our informants and inside people about any
rumors as to how the traffickers and the cartel are reacting to the threat of
decriminalization.”

“And?”

“And nothing yet.”
Which was true. It was too early to hear much of substance, but the little that
was filtering back was negative.

Salinas had done a good job of
keeping his operation under wraps, but it looked as if he’d hired a bunch
of rank amateurs to pull it off.

“All right,” Decker
said. “That’s where we stand. We’ve got lots of leads, lots
of new information, but also the damnedest set of new questions. If the toe Vanduyne
received isn’t his daughter’s, then whose is it? Or rather, whose
was it? Why send someone else’s toe?

We know Katie was in the Falls
Church house at one time, but where is she now? And why was she moved? Why was
a small-time thug named Paul Dicastro murdered in that house? Was he part of
the action from the outset or someone trying to horn in? Who does the other
bloodstain on the carpet belong to? Another of the kidnappers or an outsider?
And where is this wounded person? Is this a small-time or big-time operation?
Did the kidnappers have a falling out? Is the conspiracy busted? Who was the
woman that called Vanduyne and offered to return his daughter—for no
ransom—and then never showed. What the hell is going on?“

“Damn straight,” Canney
said. “This one’s got to be the most bizarre goddamn kidnapping
I’ve ever seen or heard of. One moment it appears to be a highly
sophisticated operation; the next—strictly amateur hour.”

You’ve got that right, Dan
thought. But Carlos Salinas is a pro. Some of the people he hired may have
fucked up, but even as we sit here, he’s tying up all those loose ends.

Dan forced himself to relax.

Everything will be all right.
Salinas will have everything under control soon, if not already. He won’t
leave a trace.