Final Epidemic (31 page)

Sunlight streamed through the large side window, dappling the bare wooden floor through curtains that had seen better days. April’s peripheral vision noted the chair that had been jammed against the inside doorknob, broken from the force of her entry. Her eyes swept past the low pile of matted, stained rags heaped on a kitchen table in the center of the room, and she felt a wave of relief that the house was empty.

Then her mind registered what her eyes had seen, and it recoiled in horror and disgust.

“Jesus,” a voice breathed from behind her. Beck was staring at the pile of rags that were not rags, his mouth slightly open and his eyes almost expressionless in disbelief.

Don’t lose it now,
April’s mind ordered her, and she spoke roughly as much to herself as to Beck.

“If you’re going to be sick, do it outside in the yard,” she
growled, and Beck looked at her as if she were a stranger. But she didn’t notice, because the floor and the walls and the ceiling had now caught her full and undivided attention.

“Oh, my God,” she said.

The wooden floor under the table had drawn much of the fluid into itself; the walls bore red-brown stripes of varying length and weight where gravity had tugged at the flying drops. She noted all this, almost academically.

But it was the ceiling that held her gaze.

From a fixture that hung over the torn remains of Lubella Tompkins, partially congealed drops of blood dangled like miniature, brown-red stalactites. Until now, April had never realized how much blood a human body held.

“I don’t want to do much guessing,” April O’Connor said into the telephone she held to her face. “But, unofficially, it appears she died sometime this morning.”

“She was tortured?” Frank Ellis’s voice, as it came over the receiver, was pitched unnaturally high.
Shock, maybe,
April thought, and felt a flash of anger.
I’m the one who had to look at her, dammit. . . .

“Yes,” she said instead. “Whoever it was had rigged up a kind of gag he could push deep down her mouth, or pull out a little. She could talk when he let her, but not scream. It looks like the son of a bitch took his time with her. And when he was done, he took a little more so he could really enjoy it as she died. Probably took a last look at his work before he went out the door.”

The professional demeanor of her voice faltered, for just a moment. “Frank, this was one sick bastard. I’ve never seen anything so sadistic.”

There was silence on the line.

“Is your Dr. Casey there? Rather, is he still functioning?”

April looked over her shoulder. “He’s doing fine,” she lied.

“Yeah.” Her SAC’s voice was unconvinced. “Okay. Stick
with him until you hear different from me. I’ll give you a few minutes, then alert Denver PD. It sure isn’t protocol, but unless you two want to hang out with the Denver homicide squad for the foreseeable future, you better secure the place and be gone. Trippett is still out there. I need you looking, not filling out reports for the local cops. And O’Connor—watch your back, and his. Stick to Casey like glue.”

April closed her cellular phone with a snap that was brisk and authoritative, wishing that she felt like either. She turned to Beck, who stood nearby. His eyes were studiously avoiding the table and the burden it bore.

“Let’s go, Beck. My boss is calling the locals, and we’ll just confuse them if we’re still here.”

He acted as if he had not heard her. When he spoke, his voice was intense with emotion.

“April, this guy enjoys what he does—I could tell when he had me hanging by my wrists,” Beck said. “But he isn’t totally out of control. He tortures when he wants information. He knew to come here looking for Trippett; he needed to know where to look next.”

Beck looked at the torn figure on the table, and April could see the effort it took.

“Beck, we have to—”

“If this woman knew anything, trust me—she told him.”

Beck looked around the room and stiffened.

“Or
showed
him,” he told April. Beck crossed the wooden floor, careful to avoid the blood smears that traversed it in parallel tracks. Then he bent, and when he came up there was the weighty thickness of a telephone directory in his hands. Beck held the directory up to April.

“Look at this.”

On the cover was the red-brown imprint of three fingers.

There were smudges inside, randomly spaced as if by fingers desperate to find the proper listing. The last stain was on a page diagonally bisected by a jagged rip; the bottom of the page had been torn from the book. Only a corner of the
display ad that had been the focus of such frantic interest was still visible.

“Something called the Mile-Hi,” April said. “It’s a theater.”

It was 1:11
P
.
M
. when April and Beck arrived at the Mile-Hi Theater; it was also already too late.

On a normal midsummer afternoon, even the Mile-Hi would have been thronged with teenagers, seniors looking for the matinee rate, bored housewives. Not today; today, there were virtually no witnesses at all. Because of the flu, movie theaters had been shut down along with every other form of group entertainment. All they had, as they pushed through double doors and into the theater lobby adjacent to the men’s room was a fourteen-year-old freshman at Denver Central High School. His name was Danny Carroll.

Thus far in his young life, Danny had identified two overwhelming passions. One was film: Danny loved movies. His room was festooned with marquee posters and books filled with cinematic lore. He had seen most of the films made by Spielberg—at least once; had worn out a pirated director’s cut of
Apocalypse Now;
and had memorized every cut and arcane camera angle in
Psycho
—the Hitchcock original, of course. His single other passion was a slightly less complicated attraction to the Big Gulp soft drinks he habitually bought at a 7-Eleven convenience store near his home.

The former passion had driven him to the Mile-Hi this afternoon for the same reason it did every afternoon: in exchange for old posters and a permanent pass for free admission, Danny handled janitorial tasks at no charge.

But it was the latter passion—indulged freely, possibly excessively, prior to his arrival at the movie house—that compelled him directly to the men’s lavatory immediately after he had unlocked the lobby doors.

According to the statement he later made to police, Danny Carroll had noticed a smoky, slightly sweet odor when he
entered the men’s room—“kind of like after you set off a Black Cat, you know, or a bottle rocket. I figured somebody had been screwing around, like maybe lighting a match for a cigarette or something.”

Whatever his theories, the inherent internal pressures of sixty-four ounces of Pepsi Cola outweighed his immediate curiosity. It was only when he finished dealing with this first priority and was turning from the urinals that Danny noticed the pool of bright red on the white-tiled floor. It was slowly spreading from under the half-closed door of one of the stalls.

Danny Carroll bent slightly, low enough to see the pair of shoes flanking the toilet’s base, long enough to note the drips that fell, regular as a leaking faucet, on one shoe’s instep.

“Hey,” Danny called tentatively. “You okay in there?” There was no answer. Carefully, the boy pushed against the stall’s door.

Inside was Orin Trippett, sitting half-slumped on the toilet. His eyes were open wide, and a trail of blood was still oozing from a neat, perfectly round hole precisely in the middle of his forehead. On the wall behind his head, a much less precise splatter of congealing blood, bone and brain formed a madly abstract pattern.

Remotely, in a deepening state of shock, Danny noticed something else.

The side pocket of the jacket the dead man wore had been ripped away violently. It was as if someone had been impatient to take possession of whatever had been carried there.

Denver, Colorado
July 23

Ilya threaded his way through the traffic as carefully as possible. He was uncertain about who he was following, though he was very clear about what had just taken place.

The theater had been quiet when he arrived a few minutes before one o’clock. He had expected to buy a ticket, intending to pay for it with a twenty-dollar bill because the price of things American still occasionally surprised him. Ilya made a practice of paying with larger bills, on the theory that a man who received change was less memorable than a person whose underpayment was called to attention.

But there had been no one at the ticket window.

He wondered if the woman called Lubella had lied to him. He thought not: she had seemed, ultimately, quite cooperative. At one point, on her hands and knees, she had even scrambled across the bare wood floor of the living room to where the telephone directory was kept: eager—in fact, by then desperate—to find for Ilya the movie theater’s address. In her wake, she had left red-brown streaks of her own blood to mark her path.

No, he was sure: she had told him what she had believed true. By now, Ilya had an instinct for such matters.

So he had finished with her—not hurriedly, but in a manner befitting the relationship they had developed. And then he had left, taking nothing but the scrap of paper she had provided. That, and his memories.

All he had to do was to come here and find a way to persuade the man to leave with him—quietly and willingly, if possible, though the latter was a secondary consideration. He did not anticipate significant difficulty in this.

But outside the theater, he had immediately sensed something was amiss. And so he waited and watched from his parked automobile, trusting the unerring instincts that longevity in his particular profession had fostered.

Finally, there had been movement from inside the theater. He had zeroed in on a gut-heavy man wearing a faded camouflage jacket at the far side of the lobby. The man had just pushed through a set of double doors—leading, Ilya presumed, to one of the viewing rooms. Even at the distance, Ilya noted that the jacket was bulky and loose fitting. That, and definitely too heavy for the midsummer weather.

But clearly,
Ilya thought,
it is the kind of apparel a man might wear if he had something he wished to conceal beneath. And the man is being cautious as he crosses the lobby—trying, a bit too obviously, to look casual about it.

He watched as the thickset man walked across the expanse of empty marble flooring, his left elbow pressed against his side. To Ilya’s not inexpert eye, the jacket seemed to hang awkwardly there; the warning bells sounded even louder in the Russian’s mind.

He is hunting,
Ilya decided.

And so he waited. From the corner of his eye, he saw the man enter the lavatory. No more than a minute later, he heard it. Few “silenced” weapons are worthy of the name: even from his car, the muffled pop was unmistakable to one familiar with the technology.

And that was more than enough. Ilya did not believe in coincidences.

The Russian already had his engine started by the time the unknown assassin exited the Mile-Hi and climbed into his own vehicle, parked well down the street. Ilya carefully pulled into position behind it.

And now, more than a half hour later, Ilya had made his decision.

This man I am following has secrets I need to share,
he thought.
He is a man I must meet. And now it is time.

He began to look for a suitable place.

Twenty yards ahead, the vehicle—
a light truck,
the Russian thought,
what they call here a “pickup”
—slowed as it turned a corner onto a tree-lined residential street.

Ilya followed, whistling a tuneless melody of anticipation.

He was certain now. The trailing vehicle had swung in an arc, settling again in his rearview mirror as the car behind him straightened. It was the same car, a dark green Chevy Malibu, and it had been behind him for the past twenty minutes—
hell,
Cappie thought,
maybe even since I left the damn theater.

He was puzzled, but not worried. Cappie Arnold had been playing a double game for almost a year now, working closely with Orin at the same time he kept the militia’s Jap patron appraised of what was happening behind the scenes. It was a situation that would have turned a more stress-prone man into a basket case; ironically, Cappie’s lack of imagination had only served to sustain him.

I mean, hell—even a damn Jap got a right to watch his back, dealing with the likes of—
Cappie chuckled, dimly aware of the irony involved—
well, of guys like Orin and me. Just shows he’s a careful kinda guy.

Most recently, Cappie had tipped his Asian benefactor to the theft of the M-16s—not the feds,
never
them, though what the Jap subsequently did with the information was certainly none of Cappie’s business. Cappie was a pragmatist: it was not so much spying on his old friend as it was helping his
new one stay on top of things. Why not? The Jap had been grateful for the heads-up—
guy knowed right away that the feds would be lookin’ into that kinda shit,
Orin noted, suitably impressed—and had been suitably generous in return.

Cappie was genuinely sorry about Orin, too. Sort of.

’Course, once he started thinkin’ about it, sooner or later he’d of knowed it was me talked,
Cappie mused. He shrugged off any regret.
Fuck it; it was him or me.
He touched his pocket, felt the weight of the can he had torn from Orin’s jacket.
There’s people who’d pay boo-coo bucks for something like this. ’Sides, I got nuthin’ against Denver. And when you get right down to it, Orin was an asshole anyway.

So much for memory lane; Cappie returned his attention to his rearview mirror.

Whoever was behind him had only limited practice in car tails. That ruled out the feds, Cappie figured; certainly they had to know their business better than the solitary silhouette in the Malibu. It also eliminated most of the other persons, law enforcement or not, whose attentions might alarm him. That left an amateur of some sort, and while that made him curious, it barely constituted a concern. Whoever was behind him was either new at this, or his experience was limited to places where it didn’t matter if the prey knew he was being stalked.