Flesh and Blood (41 page)

“She shouldn’t be talking to you.” A glint of hurt darkens Lucy’s eyes to the color of moss.

“Some months ago you suddenly got a different helicopter …”

“I like the Agusta better. It’s twenty knots faster.”

“And recently you bought a new Ferrari.”

“We need a backseat and I’ll bet Janet didn’t bother telling you why.”

“She didn’t.”

“She should tell you. Well it’s not important anymore. At least a backseat is helpful when I pick up Sock.”

“What isn’t important anymore?”

“You need to ask Janet.”

“I’m asking you.”

“Her sister has stage-four pancreatic cancer.”

“I’m so sorry. Christ. I’m so sorry. What can I do to help?” I’ve met Natalie and what races through my mind is the rest of the story.

She’s a single mother with a seven-year-old son.

“Janet promised to take Desi,” Lucy says and I’m not surprised.

Of course Janet would and even if it weren’t the right thing to do I also know she wants children. She’s not coy about it. Former FBI, an environmental lawyer now, she’s gentle, settled down and would be an excellent mother. Lucy worries she’d be a bad one. She’s always said she couldn’t deal with kids.

“Of course I’ll help. I’ll do anything you need,” I repeat.

“I can’t do it,” she says.

“Desi adores you.”

“He’s great but no.”

“You would let him end up in social services?” I can’t believe she would be so selfish and cold. “Well that’s never going to happen. I’ll take him before that happens, and you of all people know …”

I don’t finish. I’m not going to say that if it hadn’t been for me stepping in and being a surrogate mother to her there’s no telling what would have happened.

“Natalie was diagnosed a few months ago,” Lucy says, her eyes bright with tears for an instant.

At least she feels bad about it. At least she feels something.

“It had already spread to the lymph nodes, her liver.” She looks around the bar and she doesn’t look at me. “It’s stage four and all of us have prepared for the worst. I got the car. I’ve done everything I can and it was fine until last month when I decided no. I told Janet no I can’t. She should do what she needs to do but I can’t.”

“Of course you can.”

“No. It’s not possible.”

“Last month.” It occurs to me. “Why did you decide this last month?”

Lucy takes the last swallow of her beer. “I’ve told her she shouldn’t be with me. Especially if there’s a kid, neither of them should be with me. But she won’t listen and I can’t tell her the reason.”

“That’s why you stopped wearing her ring. You want to break up. Are you seeing someone?”

“Yes I want to break up.”

“Yet you and Janet were flying Thursday morning and buzzed my house. You’re clearly very hurt. I know you love her. You never stopped loving her all the years you were apart. You found each other again and now you do this?”

“The past is the problem. It’s anything but past and that’s a problem as big as one could ever get,” she says and I feel it again, the huge beast I can’t see and then the sensation, the flutter in my gut.

“It doesn’t sound to me that you really want to break up.” I hear my own voice and it isn’t convincing or strong as I try to push down nausea.

“She needs to move out. She should have already. I told her I’ll give her whatever she wants but she needs to get as far away from all of us as she possibly can.” Lucy’s face is stony and beneath her hard cool surface is a desire too hot to touch, molten and flowing like the core of the earth.

“You just said
all of us.
”

“I was with Janet when it began. First Quantico and then we were living together in D.C.” Lucy says what seems to be a non sequitur. “But Janet wasn’t on the radar and now she is.”

“On whose radar?”

“Janet would be on it now and it’s incredibly dangerous, it couldn’t be more dangerous with only one way it can end. Anything I care about she wants me to lose.”

“Janet doesn’t want to take anything from you.”

“I’m not talking about her.”

“Then who?” I’m suddenly chilled and sick.

I put my jacket on. I press my hands against my face and they’re so cold my fingernails are blue. I think about rushing to the ladies’ room. I sit still and breathe slowly. I wait without speaking until the attack passes, and I see it again. I see it move.

T
HE BEER. THE SAINT
Pauli Girl,” Lucy says and the great beast is as big as the Rockies.

I feel its unblinking stare and its smell is strongly sour.

“You don’t find it everywhere and this bar doesn’t have many people who ask for it.”

“You know someone who drinks it,” I reply, and she nods, and the air shifts and the smell changes.

A gamey wet odor that I know is an olfactory hallucination as a primitive part of my brain somehow knows what’s coming. It’s threatening enough that I can’t give it form. I can’t capture it as a conscious thought.

“On the night of May eleventh, Sunday, Mother’s Day, at eleven-thirty-nine
P.M.
to be exact, this particular server”—Lucy looks across the room at her—“waited on a woman who sat at that table over there near the bar.” She indicates a corner table that is occupied by a heavyset man in a suit, drinking whiskey. “This woman ordered Saint Pauli Girl, four of them over a period of two hours, and when she ordered the third one at exactly eleven-twenty-two
P.M.
she got up to use the ladies’ room. But that’s not the only place she went.”

“She stopped by the business center.” I can see where this is headed and I feel myself resisting as the flutter comes back powerfully and moves up my throat.

“Yes,” Lucy says and our waitress returns with a St. Pauli Girl, my extra shot and a large carafe of tonic water, cold with tiny gas bubbles suspended in it.

She sets them down and doesn’t linger.

“She thinks I’m going to cause her trouble, but I’m not.” Lucy picks up her beer.

“Why would she be in trouble?” I pour the gin into my melted ice and fill the glass from the carafe.

“Because the beers were comped. Maybe one would have been okay but not all four of them. She says she did it because the woman scared her. She was quote
weird
with creepy eyes, and after she was finished drinking each beer she placed the empty bottle in her tote bag. She didn’t use a glass and she wiped off the table and her chair.”

“Why?”

“Why do you think?”

“She didn’t want anyone to have access to her DNA or fingerprints. Did the waitress tell you this?” The gin and tonic helps wash down the bile sneaking up. “And when did you have this conversation?”

After we checked into the hotel I was busy on my computer. I made phone calls to Luke and then to Benton, who’s not answering, and I showered and changed, meeting Lucy here at ten-fifteen. She got to the bar before I did and gathered the information she needed, and it’s no wonder the waitress is avoiding her.

“She’s seen what’s all over the news about the shootings here and in Cambridge,” Lucy says. “I made it clear she would be wise not to hold anything back from me and if she keeps her mouth shut so will I. Four free beers and Carrie, who came on to her, gave her a hundred-dollar bill for a tip, tucked it in the front of her pants.”

“Carrie?” The beast steps out of the brush and it’s unbelievably noisy and I smell how old it is. “Carrie?” I repeat, and Lucy smiles thinly, coldly.

“This time she loses for good.” Hatred and that’s not all. “I won’t allow collateral damage. Not Janet, not a kid, not anyone.”

I lean forward in my chair and everything that’s happened crashes through my mind, charging right at me. The shootings, the tweets, the pennies, Patty Marsico, Gracie Smithers and the sailboat, the corrupted DNA profile and apparent planted evidence and now the beer.

“Carrie Grethen.” Lucy’s matter-of-factness is more terrifying than the name itself.

The beer. The beer. The beer
, my inner voice isn’t quiet anymore. In this very bar. Lucy picked the Madison Hotel, not me, and she doesn’t see what’s happening. A buried plague like an ancient virus waking up in thawing permafrost, and she’s as bloodthirsty as she’s lustful. She’ll be infected and probably is and always was.

Another poem sent to me, this one from Wards Island, New York, the women’s ward of Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center where Carrie Grethen was committed because she was too dangerous to be contained in any other facility. Criminally insane, too mentally unfit to stand trial, but it wasn’t true. It couldn’t have been more false. She was never crazy, was anything but crazy, and I remember what Benton said after she escaped from maximum security:

Carrie Grethen hasn’t finished ruining people’s lives.

“She’s dead.” I say it quietly, carefully, my hands cradling my drink as I hold Lucy’s stare. “We saw her helicopter blow up midair and crash into the ocean after you fired an A-R-fifteen at it through your open door.”

It was a white Schweizer that was no match for Lucy’s Jet Ranger or her skills. But we were low on fuel when its pilot, Carrie’s killing partner Newton Joyce, opened fire with a submachine gun, hitting our skids, our fuselage. Lucy didn’t want to crash over a crowded beach, over occupied buildings and busy streets. So she banked and headed out over the Atlantic Ocean where we could die without taking innocent people with us. That was thirteen years ago.

“She isn’t,” Lucy says. “Carrie’s not dead. You won’t prove it through fingerprints or DNA. Those files are never purged from IAFIS or CODIS and she knows all about it, is too smart to be caught that way, and not with trace evidence or ballistics either. Someone who helped me engineer and program the FBI computer system and you think for one minute any traditional means will stop her?”

Nothing was too violent, too monstrous for her. She picked a killing partner, a sexual sadist who had been disfigured, horribly scarred. He abducted objects of his obsession, people who were beautiful to him. He cut off their faces. He had a freezer full of them.

“To Carrie forensics is nothing more than Tinkertoys. Rudimentary and childish,” Lucy goes on and she could be describing herself.

I envision the tiny piston helicopter exploding into a ball of fire, breaking apart and raining down into the sea. There would have been no survivors. But I never actually saw Carrie Grethen. I saw the pilot, a glimpse of his scarred face. I assumed Carrie was in the other seat. Everyone assumed it. Her remains were never found, only part of Newton Joyce’s charred left leg.

“QUANTICO,” SHE SAYS
. “The Board Room, the Globe and Laurel, our hangouts when we were developing CAIN. That’s what we drank together, our favorite German beer. She knows I’d think of it.
Tick Tock … Watch the clock BIG DOC.
”

Copperhead
is Carrie Grethen.

“And the poem sent to you on Mother’s Day has the same language,” Lucy says. “
Watch the clock Doc.
Tick Tock
. It was always you she hated. She was jealous of our relationship and couldn’t stand that you weren’t afraid of her.”

During one of our earliest encounters we almost came to blows, I disliked her instantly and that much. I remember lying in wait at a spy shop in a Northern Virginia shopping mall. Had there not been other customers present when Carrie walked in with coffee I’m sure she would have thrown it in my face. I see it. I hear it. As if it just happened, the way I led her to an empty bench by a fountain and spoke to her in a way she wouldn’t forget.

There’s no point in wasting your charm on me because I have you figured out
.

Lucy was a teenager when she began her internship with the FBI, working out of Quantico’s classified Engineering Research Facility, the ERF. Carrie was her mentor and I can see her clearly from back then, her eyes a dark blue that would turn violet on their way to steely hard, and she had a rare beauty, fine featured, a brunette, and I envision the person driving Rand Bloom’s gray pickup truck.

Short hair possibly dyed light blond, big glasses and a cap pulled low, and it could have been Carrie and then I’m sure it was. When I first met her at the ERF I couldn’t tell her age but she’s older than Lucy, well into her forties now. Carrie is vain. She would have taken impeccable care of herself. She’d look younger than her years and be extremely fit, the two of them, Lucy and Carrie. They’re each other’s good and evil other half.

“Okay I’m listening. I’m open-minded and reasonable. I’m listening carefully.” My voice doesn’t begin to convey what I feel. “She didn’t die.”

“I’ve always wondered about it.” Lucy’s attention is all around us as if Carrie Grethen might be here. “I must have known at some level that she wasn’t inside the helicopter.”

“Then who was?” I ask and the nausea has completely passed.

“The glare on the windscreen and Newton Joyce started shooting at us,” Lucy says. “It could be that no one else was in it. I don’t know. But Carrie wasn’t and she’s not dead.”

“That was a long time ago. Where’s she been and why now?” I want to argue it away but I know better, and my focus couldn’t be keener.

“She used to tell me how much she hated America. God knows she hated the FBI and only went to work for them so she could steal technology.” Lucy has lost interest in her beer and her eyes are everywhere. “She used to talk about moving to Russia and working with military intelligence. She was an admirer of the old Soviet Union the same way Putin is and felt that the demise of the USSR was a tragedy.”

“And you didn’t think it was unusual for an American who worked at Quantico to talk like that?” I’m careful not to sound like I’m blaming her. I notice our waitress gathering her belongings from behind the bar. I motion for her to bring the check.

“I was in college,” Lucy says. “She was very persuasive and manipulative and I admit it. I thought she was really cool. Maybe I just didn’t think period. And I was a rebel. I hated rules.”