Hooked (13 page)

32

I
told Erin that I wanted her to go into the Internet service provider and con them into giving her the address for Strawberry Labs.

She put her hand on my knee and cooed, “I really want to look at Andy’s diary.”

“We’re in a hurry. One thing at a time.”

She grabbed a bottled water from the backseat and a manila envelope from my stack of papers. On the envelope, she wrote “Strawberry Labs.” She got out of the car and walked into the Internet service provider. There was a kid who looked to be about seventeen years old behind the counter. Just after she walked in the door, Erin tripped, spilling water from the bottle onto the front of her T-shirt. She was good.

As I waited, I thought about Heather Asternak, whom I’d met six months earlier. I’d just wrapped up the story about Timothy Aravelo, and was looking to write about something that had zero chance of yielding a subpoena. Enter Heather, a dermatologist.

I was writing a story about a trend among medical students: In growing numbers, they were abandoning bread-and-butter specialties, like family medicine, in favor of subspecialties like dermatology, where the hours were more manageable and the money much better.

What struck me first about Heather was her heavy makeup—unnecessary given her youth and natural attractiveness. And when, over french fries and lemonade, she gave her reasons for choosing dermatology, she sounded like something she was reading out of a manual.

I asked enough questions to keep the conversation going, then shut up and listened. She told me where she grew up, what drew her to medicine, when she fell into her first love—cooking. We ordered a second round of lemonades. She said how frustrating it was to have a soufflé fall. I nodded, as if to say: There is no perfection.

“You love cooking, don’t you?” I said.

She took a big gulp of lemonade. She looked toward the corner of the restaurant. More specifically, she looked away from my eyes.

“I cheated on my boards,” she said.

Just like that. I tried not to suck too hard on my straw.

“I’ve never told a soul.”

Heather was technically not a doctor at all, at least as far as the state licensing boards were concerned. She told me that she’d pursued dermatology because she didn’t trust her abilities. She thought she could do the least amount of damage.

I never figured out what happened with her. I never told anyone about it. But I stored it away as a valuable insight—a lesson on how to wait out a revelation: (1) Care, and (2) let the source fill in the silences.

That was my plan for Erin, who had performed masterfully with the seventeen-year-old. She told the young man she’d driven down from San Jose to courier some documents to Strawberry Labs, only to realize the office that sent her had left the stupid street address off the envelope. She couldn’t get anyone on the phone at the San Jose office, couldn’t find Strawberry Labs in the phone book, and wondered if he knew anything about the area. Nope, he couldn’t help her. She looked distraught. Anything he could do to help? she asked. She was having a really rough day. Wait, he said. What a coincidence, Strawberry Labs was a customer.

“Three miles into the canyon,” Erin said to me coldly.

I stopped at the one coffee shop in town and ordered the tallest, most powerful drink on the chalkboard. Then I asked the young lady behind the counter to add two shots of espresso. She was probably wondering: Where is the elephant he’s planning to revive?

We wound up the canyon, through an increasingly dense green forest. Dirt side roads emerged, and our address came up on the right. We drove a quarter of a mile in through dense overhang and came to a gate. Behind it were three houses. The one in the middle was the most modern. It had the look of a log cabin, but a perfectly manicured one you’d find in the pages of
Architectural Digest
.

The buildings to its left and right seemed similarly empty. Or, at least, there were no sounds or movement to indicate that we were sharing the wilderness. The building on the left was a rectangular pine shed that stretched fifty feet into the forest. Probably storage. The building on the right was a single-story residence, stained dark with red curtains drawn. It looked sterile. If this had been a campsite, it would have been the infirmary. Attached to it was a single-story garage.

“The most sinister bed-and-breakfast I’ve ever seen,” I said.

Said Erin, “We want the one in the middle.”

As I approached the front door, I had a surge of reassurance and courage. Not from any sudden sense of perspective, or its loss, but from the sign.

“Strawberry Labs,” it read. In small black handwritten letters on a piece of wood hanging by the door from a wire.

It’s just a Silicon Valley software company, I thought. Perhaps the arm of something sinister, perhaps not. These were just engineers. Engineers didn’t merit this kind of suspicion. That’s what I told myself as I rapped my knuckles on the door of the business named after my dead girlfriend’s dead dog.

No answer. I rapped again. No answer. Erin pushed open the door. We entered a messy room dominated by a round oak dining table covered with mountains of paper in total disarray, as if someone had come in, found an unkempt pile of papers, and then given it all a good going-over with a leaf blower.

The openings in the middle belonged to two stairwells, just to the right of the front door, one set of stairs going up, one headed down—presumably to the garage.

“Hello,” I yelled, then took a step toward the stairs leading upward. “Anyone home?”

No answer. I looked back at Erin. She was looking down the other set of stairs. I turned back toward the stairs heading up, and climbed. At the top, I saw three doors. All closed. The door closest was the one to the left. Instinct drove me to it, or maybe it was the pungent smell.

The door opened easily. My eyes flashed first on a bank of computers. The image gave way quickly. To Plexiglas cages, at least a dozen, more like twenty, stacked four on top of each other. Each with at least one rat, some with five or more.

It took me a moment to realize they were dead. It looked like they were in suspended animation. Their lives had stopped mid-breath, as if the taxidermist had already visited, pulled their stuffing out, and sewed them up.

Only one thing could do this: highly potent poison. A theory verified when I looked to a table to the right and saw a handful of small medicine-sized bottles of strychnine, opened, one tipped on its side. I crept closer to one cage. Near the bottom, in the middle of the stack, five gray rats inside. On the cage, there was a handwritten nameplate: “A6-A10.”

I fought a wave of nausea. I pulled my shirt over my mouth—if there was disease here, I’d be well served not to inhale too deeply, though it was probably too late.

Something else told me disease wasn’t at play—it was the two bald spots at the top of each rat’s head, toward the back of the skull. They’d been shaved, as had their erstwhile compatriots. Cage upon cage, each dead rodent shaved, each with two bald spots exposing rough skull. Except one. The gleam caught my eye. On the top right. B4. Black hair, in a cage by itself. The rat wore a thin metal band around its head, held tightly with screws. Two thin black electrical lines were attached to the back, leading out of the cage. Before I could discern where it led, I heard the scraping noise.

I spun around. How had I not bothered to look in the corner of the room?

One more cage, with one more rat. I moved toward its Plexiglas home. “A11” was still breathing.

“You’re going to be okay, little fella,” I said.

Had it been poisoned too, and survived, or merely overlooked by the assailant? My emergency training didn’t extend to rats. And saving A11 wasn’t really the point. What had happened here? Torture? An experiment? Both?

I returned to B4, the black-furred critter with the metal headband.

I’d seen testing labs in medical school. This looked consistent—lots of cages and rats, yielding lots of data. What kind of data? Why?

“Oh God.”

It was Erin. I turned around. She had her hands at her mouth. We locked eyes, hers registering terror, then a sudden resolution.

“Nathaniel,” she said. “We have to get out of here!”

I looked at her, not grasping her urgency. I turned back and pulled on the cage door.

“Nat. Now,” she screamed. “The house is on fire!”

33

W
e’re going to die in here.”

I didn’t see or smell anything burning, so I wasn’t sharing Erin’s urgency. That’s when I heard a throaty boom, followed by an aftershock. Something in the bowels of the log structure had exploded. The house turned momentarily into a waterbed. We swayed. I fell to my left, losing my grip on the cage, touching a knee to the floor.

I was bathed in heat. A swirl of dangerous and cruel air surged up the stairwell.

“The basement,” Erin said. “There was a pool of gasoline by the furnace.”

She pulled at my shoulder again.

The basement. It sounded so distant when she said it. Two floors and three galaxies away.

“I need a second to figure out what happened.”

“No, we have to get out of here.”

I followed each of the wires connected to B4’s head to where they led. Nowhere. They lay on the ground in back of the cages, unattached to anything. But each had a little tag. One wire had the word “stim,” the other read “wave.”

I started pulling at the door to B4’s cage, to lift it. It was locked to the cage beneath. All the cages were attached. I needed a tool.

“Dammit.”

“Leave it,” Erin shouted.

I didn’t respond.

“Give me the car keys.”

“Help me look, Erin.”

“I’m leaving. Now.”

Erin stood by a window overlooking the front of the house, staring resolute and contemptuous. She caught my eye, then turned to look out the window.

“Look!”

“What?”

She was pointing.

“Nat!”

Another burst of hot air surged from the stairwell. And I looked where she pointed, out the window. A spit of flame jumped up in staccato leaps like a spring of orange water.

“I know. It’s a tinderbox. I need your help, Erin.”

“No!”

No, it’s not a tinderbox? Or, no, she wouldn’t help?

“Look! A car—driving out of the gate,” she said. “Please. We have to go. Now! Move, or give me the car keys and stay here and play detective yourself.”

I couldn’t respond. I couldn’t be drawn away from the room. I wanted to have control over one goddamn thing. All the helplessness of the preceding few days felt like it had come down to this moment. What had happened here?

Erin was pointing out the window. I saw a single flame whisk at the top of the edge of the window. And I felt a brush of heat graze the bottom of my feet. I moved closer to the window to look for what Erin had seen. There was nothing. Maybe it was hidden from view. Maybe it had already made its escape.

Arson.

Erin.

“Erin, did you . . . ” I said. “Did you? . . . ”

“What?” she said. Not hearing, or understanding, or pretending not to.

I shook my head. No way. My brain felt muddled and fuzzy. No time to think. No clarity. I looked at Erin. She caught my eye, then started moving. Sprinting. But it looked like slow motion.

She bounded down the stairs.

I took a step to follow her.

Then turned around. I wanted a second look at the operation center called Strawberry Labs. Was there anything I could imprint? Any clue? Anything I could testify to later?

I swiveled my head across the lab. Everything blurred together. Rats, medical equipment, a bank of computers, nothing discernible. No smoking gun.

I gave a final glance to the still living rat, the hearty soul known as A11. I yanked open its cage door. The critter scampered out and I pushed it off the table. It ran three steps, stopped, sniffed, fled to the stairs, slid down a step, stopped again, and pulled itself back up, then began frantically circling the room. Under the edge of its cage, something caught my eye. Pinned beneath was a tattered piece of paper. I reached two fingers through the bars. The paper looked to have names and numbers. It was technical, with decimal points, and something familiar. At the bottom, the scrawled words: “Password— Vestige.”

I clenched my teeth in thought, and I felt piercing warmth. On my feet.

The floor was on fire.

The baseboard was pulsing red—the foreplay just before the real heat started.

I stuffed the piece of paper in my front pocket.

“Time to go.”

I looked back at the stairwell and saw a lick of flame. I took a step to the stairs. A surge of black smoke billowed out of the opening. Danger.

The window.

I looked to my left, above a table holding a computer monitor. Another window. Overlooking the side of the cabin. I jogged to it. I peered outside. Flames surged more persistently up the side of the house, though still not regularly enough to form a wall. They seeped from the garage. Or maybe even the first floor.

I yanked the monitor off the table and tossed it through the window. Cool air. I toppled the table.

I moved to the window. Suddenly, an explosion and a surge of flames. I looked down. Fire bathed the house’s side. If I jumped, I was leaping into a cauldron. I looked back at the stairs. Smoke churned from the stairwell. I sprinted toward it, and got rebuffed by a surge of flame, jutting up toward me.

That’s when I realized the full extent of my mess. I could see that eight stairs down, the stairwell took a ninety-degree turn. It meant I had visibility about halfway; if I made it the first eight steps, I would turn the corner into an uncertain fate.

I looked back at my surroundings. I’d remembered something—about the room, and about medical training 101. There it was. Under the table I’d overturned—a small green-and-blue area rug.

I yanked at the rug, dragged it back to the stairs, and wrapped it around my shoulders.

“Now or not at all.”

I took a step toward the top of the stairs. I pulled the rug over my shoulders. I realized that the moment I turned the corner on the stairs, I’d have to make a decision: If the fire wasn’t too bad, I’d walk out the front door; if it was bad, wrap myself and roll. And pray.

I took a step toward the stair and felt a dying man’s last wishes. Let me live long enough to find out what happened to Annie.

I took the next step, the wool rug wrapped around my shoulders, dragging down from my back and behind me like a cape. Smoke streamed around me. I took the final step before the turn of the stairs in silence, then heard an explosion. A burp from the guts of the house. Something highly flammable had caught fire. The explosion had a domino effect. The noise was followed by a burst of heat and a stream of fire—coming around the corner, right at me. Instinctively, I fell back onto the stairs. I began sliding on the rug. Back down the stairs. I braced my foot against the wall.

I flailed frantically, grabbing for a wooden rail. I snagged it, succeeding in slowing my descent, then I halted the slide altogether. I used the leverage to pull myself to my feet.

I stepped back toward the turn in the stairs, then turned the corner. Flames were covering the first floor and the staircase just a foot below me.

Eight steps separated me from the floor.

I pulled at the corner of the rug and yanked it toward me, turning into a human enchilada wrapped in woven wool. I let myself fall backward. I pulled the rug on top of me, rolled, and saw a life flash before my eyes. Not mine, Sonny Ellison’s. For just a nanosecond, I thought of a young man who had come into the emergency room when I was a medical student. His Civic had dived fifty feet over the edge of Sea Cliff onto the rocks. The gas tank exploded. Ellison lived, and I never forgot him, or what the human body could sustain in pursuit of its own survival, like the bumps slamming into me as I rolled down the stairs. And suddenly stopped.

I was at the bottom of the stairs, consumed with heat.

I flung open the rug from around my shoulders. I’d hoped it would stamp out the flames in my immediate vicinity, plaster them to the ground.

I got lucky. The rug opened toward the door. The ultimate red carpet.

The porch was hot, but not engulfed in flames. I tumbled down two concrete stairs and fell onto the gravel in front of what would soon be the ashes of Strawberry Labs.

There was Erin. Ashen-faced, covered in char, standing beside the car.

“What the hell is going on, Erin?”

“Thank goodness. I thought you were going to die.”

I ambled toward her, trying to gauge her expression. Sincerity? Fear? Outright manipulation?

Suddenly, I grabbed her by the shoulders.

“What are you doing, Nat?”

“You left me in there to die.”

“You’re crazy. You’re freaking out.”

She spun away from me, insisting she’d seen a red sports car leave the property. “We have to go!” she said. Dazed, I climbed into the car. The house was gurgling and bursting. A surge of heat bathed us. Then another wave, this one internal. A fierce pulsing, the headache again. Erin pulled the keys from my hand and put them in the ignition. I kept her from starting the car. I looked back at the compound, the house in the middle now ablaze.

“What happened to Annie?” I said.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“What’s Vestige?”

She turned the keys in the ignition.

I said, “Time for the police.”

I sped down the mountain, looking for a phantom sports car and a cell phone signal. I couldn’t find either. Just before Felton’s town center, there was a four-way stop. A road sign said it was ten miles to Santa Cruz. It might be impossible to go back in time, but you can at least visit. Time for a trip down memory lane.

“You like fire,” I said coldly. “You like to see things burn?”

The rat lab, the café, a pornography studio, Simon Anderson’s house.

“What are you talking about?” Erin said.

“Let’s start simple.”

“Simple?”

“I want to know the real reason you didn’t like Simon Anderson,” I said.

It had been kicking around in my head, a relative coldness in the way she described him, the fact that she didn’t get out of the car at his funeral, or when the Anderson house burned down, looking at the ruins of someone she had known well. It didn’t seem like her style, even if, as she said, Simon Anderson had been a player.

“I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Now, Erin.”

I turned the car toward Santa Cruz.

Silence.

Finally, she said, “How did you know?”