Light Before Day (32 page)

"Except for Joseph Spinotta," I said.

"Yes," he said. "It's a lesson Joseph taught me, and I will be forever indebted to him for it."

I wanted to ask him why die boys had to be drugged to receive the precious gift that men like Joseph Spinotta had for them. I wanted to tell Martin Cale that no matter what I had done in a blackout, no matter what we were getting ready to watch, I was not like him and never would be.

My natural desires were for another man who could think and reason and feel pain the way I did, and those qualities could not be found in a thirteen-year-old boy. The idea of having sex with one was not just repulsive to me; it was preposterous.

I realized I had just listed several good reasons why I could never be convinced to violate a child in a blackout. I felt a small, firm knot form in my chest. I wondered if it was the first sign of what Brenda Wilton had called faith.

Martin Cale glanced down at his watch. "Everett!" he shouted. "It's time!"

The engines died beneath us. Cale gestured toward the master suite. I smiled and gestured for him to go first. He did. As soon as he turned his back on me, I pulled the box cutter from my right boot and slid it inside the right sleeve of my jacket. I pressed my middle three fingers down on the retracted blade On the other side of the false wall, a large plasma-screen television stared down at a king-size bed with a chocolate-colored comforter. Two high-backed chairs had been placed in front of the bed. Martin Cale took a seat in one, his eyes already on the television screen. He patted the empty chair next to his.

Everett stood over an art deco desk that sat against one wall of windows. He was watching the seconds tick by on his digital watch. A silver laptop computer sat open on the desk in front of him. Behind it, there was something that looked like a tiny satellite dish. It was angled toward the darkness outside. Joseph Spinotta had been a master at implementing wireless Internet systems, and I figured this was his piece de resistance. A second cord ran from the computer off the side of the desk. I traced the cord's path to the bottom of the TV on the wall above.

Everett looked from his watch to the desk in front of him. A small white keypad sat in front of the computer. I could just make out a long series of alternating numbers on its LED display. I had seen the device before. Large corporations used it to provide their employees with a unique password every time they logged on to their e-mail accounts. I wondered if Corey had discovered the keypad and the dish when he had searched his uncle's yacht.

The computer monitor's screen went blank. The plasma-screen TV followed suit a few

seconds later. A digital countdown appeared, starting at ten and going all the way to two. Then it was replaced by a password entry blank. I heard Everett punching keys on the computer's keyboard and saw small block dots fill the blank on the television screen.

The password entry blank disappeared and the screen went from blank to red, a slow

dissolve. A message box appeared. It read
Confirming Authorization.

"How much longer?" Cale whispered.

"It usually takes about twenty seconds," Everett answered.

Cale closed one hand over mine, the one that had the tip of the box cutter in it. I eased it up inside the sleeve of my jacket. Cale sensed this small motion and responded by adjusting his grip.

"Where does it come from?" I heard myself ask.

"What?" Cale asked.

"The broadcast," I said.

Cale laughed in his throat, amused but distracted by what was to come. "If anyone knew the answer to that question, there wouldn't be another broadcast. We wouldn't want that now, would we?"

I glanced over my shoulder and caught Everett staring at me. My question had brought an unexpected longing to his face. It seemed as if he wanted to know the answer as much as I did.

He looked away from me quickly. Maybe he had glimpsed the horror I was trying to conceal and decided he had no use for it.

"How often?" I asked.

"What?" Cale snapped.

"Twice a month," Everett said from behind me.

Cale shifted in his seat. "How much longer, Everett?"

"Ten seconds. Maybe."

Jimmy had been right. Joseph Spinotta was in hiding somewhere, and he was broadcasting his product with a wireless signal that clearly had the strength to travel across a great distance to the computers of his paying customers. The man sitting next to me was one of those customers.

He clutched my hand in his as if the two of us were about to witness a birth.

A second password entry blank appeared. Everett responded with a series of keystrokes. The entry blank vanished and Martin Cale interlaced his fingers in mine. I heard a soft sound behind us and realized that Everett had sprawled himself out on the bed.

On the television screen above, the blackness materialized into heavy tree branches shifting in a slight wind at nighttime. The camera tilted down to find a small dirt trail that cut through the dense greenery. The trail was bathed in a viciously bright light, so bright I almost didn't see the young boy stumbling toward us.

The boy gained definition as he approached. He wore a white T-shirt and white boxer shorts.

His hair had been cut short and bleached blond. His arms were outstretched in front of him. I saw the white blindfold that covered his eyes.

"Beautiful," Martin Cale whispered.

My vision blurred. I blinked madly and got it back.

The boy reached out toward us, his fingers almost grazing the camera lens. The image faded to black and the words
Bobby is lost . . .
scrolled across the screen. Another few seconds of darkness, then a second set of words appeared. . . .
Bobby is found.

Then I saw a white backdrop and a spread of pillows. I recognized the drab milk-colored carpeting that lay between the pillows because I walked on it every day.

In the seconds before the camera focused in, I glimpsed the patch of ceiling above my queen-size bed and saw that the white backdrop was a bedsheet taped to the black Oriental screen that I never used, the one that had been opened and placed next to my bed during my blackout.

I made myself breathe.

The same boy we had watched stumble down a dirt path was lifted into the frame gently, by a gloved hand that held the back of his hair. Melissa was right; he had the face of an angel. His full lips parted, his chubby cheeks flushed red with whatever drug had added ten pounds of weight to his eyelids.

A small voice spoke to me through the riot of screams inside my head. It was small and quiet but persistent. It was telling me that the screams were lying to me. I was watching the exact same ritual Melissa Brady had described to me the day before.

The image dissolved. Now the camera shifted back several feet, and the boy lay on his back on the bed of pillows, his head toward the camera. When I saw that he was nude, I closed my eyes and tried to suppress a shudder. I failed. Martin Cale mistook it for desire and squeezed my hand.

Behind us, I heard Everett shifting as he moved in for a closer look.

A man entered the frame. He was wearing the leather jacket I had on at that very moment.

There was a black leather mask over his face; it had tiny inverted triangles for eyeholes and a leering grin composed of fat, sculpted lips outlined in gold paint. The man had my height, my build, and my straw-colored hair. He was naked except for the jacket.

I focused on his nudity and not the young boy's. I zeroed in on precisely what Melissa Brady had seen, the very details of anatomy that had led her to throw her computer out the window when she had watched this same video.

The man in the video, the man who had violated a young boy in my apartment, was a marine helicopter pilot named Daniel Brady.

He was my height; he had my build, my hair. Even without a leather mask covering his face, he and I had looked remarkably alike. I had paid too little attention to these similarities between us, seen them as nothing more than proof that Corey had desired both of us at different times.

I was on my feet. Cale's fingers grazed my back, but he was too riveted by the screen to pay much attention to my sudden withdrawal.

I walked toward the cabin windows, listening to my long exhalation of breath, which anyone could have mistaken for a sign of sexual pleasure. The light from the master suite fell across the water outside in a gentle undulating wave.

I could feel the truth behind this scenario revealing itself.

The previous Wednesday night, I had slept in an alcoholic stupor as a marine helicopter pilot named Daniel Brady violated a young boy on the floor of my apartment. I knew Corey could not have filmed the video himself. Daniel Brady would never have agreed to take part if that had been the case. I figured the gloved hand that had lifted the young boy's face into the frame belonged to Scott Koffler.

Martin Cale was riveted. He could not tell that the man on screen was not me. If Melissa Brady had not described the very same video to me the day before, if I had never set out in search of the truth behind Daniel Brady's visit to West Hollywood, would I have mistaken the masked man on the television screen for myself as well?

"They don't move," Cale whispered in paralyzed ecstasy. "They don't arch their backs like a cat. They don't sneer like some little porn star. Their bodies don't know how to resist."

On the bed just behind Martin Cale, Everett sat forward on his knees, his brow furrowed, his eyes squinting, and his lips parted. He had removed the silver bicycle chain from around his neck and crossed his arms over his chest. One end of the chain dangled from his right fist. He was studying the events on screen with a focus I couldn't muster.

His eyes slid to meet mine. "It's not you," Everett whispered. He knew. He had handled the evidence a few days before when he had pawed me outside Billy's front gate.

"You're right, Everett," I said under my breath. "It's not me. But Billy thinks it's me, doesn't he?"

"Quiet!" Cale barked. The man had not heard a single word we said.

"It's really not you," Everett whispered, as if he needed to say the words again to convince himself of their truth. He seemed to be feeling a betrayal as deep as my own.

"Shut up!" Cale roared. "Both of you!"

Everett flinched. Cale shot me a ferocious look, his teeth bared. Behind him, Everett lifted his silver bicycle chain in both fists and spread his knees slightly to steady himself. He jerked both ends of the chain. The spokes shifted and formed a single sharp edge.

Cale settled back into his seat. I watched, dumb and motionless, as Everett brought the chain around the man's throat. "Why don't
you
shut up?" he whispered. He snapped back on both ends of the chain.

I heard my back slam into the window behind me, and then I felt the impact a second later. I watched Martin Cale's mouth fall open and his hands rise to the chain wrapped around his throat.

Everett pulled back more on the chain, and the man let out a nasal squeak. Cale's grasping hands fell short of their goal. He pawed at the quilt of red that was sliding down the front of his shirt, summoned some last reserve, and bucked his hips out of the chair.

Everett removed the chain from Martin Cale's neck, holding it out to one side as if it were a piece of wet laundry before he dropped it on the bed. Then he gave the back of Martin Cale's head a gentle shove and Cale fell facefirst to the carpet.

I was whispering a stream of curses into my palms.

Everett was still kneeling on the foot of the bed, his arms at his sides, his fingers slick with blood. He stared down at Martin Cale's body with a wide-eyed intensity and a look of surprised disappointment, like a kid who opens a shiny Christmas present and finds socks inside.

Murdering the man had not given him the release he had hoped for.

The movie continued to play. I caught a glimpse of a close-up shot and groped for the back of the laptop computer. I yanked out the cord and the screen went gray. I grabbed the miniature satellite dish and shoved it into my jacket pocket. When I reached for the LED keypad, the box cutter slid out of my sleeve and bounced on the carpet.

Everett gave me a dull look that had madness flickering behind it. I held his eyes as I shoved the keypad into my jacket pocket, then just stood there, my heart roaring. The two of us listened to the water lapping against the boat's hull.

"What was supposed to happen out here tonight, Everett?" I asked him.

"Get off the boat," he said in a voice struggling for aggression. Whatever plan he had been given by Billy had been destroyed by the revelation that I was not a performer in the film we had just watched.

"What did Billy tell you to do?"

"Get off the boat," he said with building anger.

Everett got to his feet and started toward me. He grabbed the bloody chain, strung it between his fists, and raised it in front of him. I stumbled backward into the main cabin.

"Billy told you it was me on that tape," I said. "Billy
believes
it's me on that tape, doesn't he?"

Everett kept advancing toward me across the room, his jaw quivering. My back hit the door to the back deck. It swung open behind me and I had to grab the frame to keep from losing my balance. I heard something hit the floor next to my feet and saw the miniature satellite dish dancing across the carpet away from me. Everett ignored it.

"Were you supposed to kill both of us?" I asked him. He didn't answer, which was an incriminating answer. He was still advancing, the chain level with my throat. I could either get off the boat as he asked or knock the boy off his feet and try to get the answers I wanted out of him.

"Where are you from, Everett?" I asked.

He sprang toward me and I went skittering backward across the deck. The boy worked for Billy Hatfill, and he had just murdered one of Billy's customers. He moved and spoke like a hollowed-out suggestion of a child. He carried a weapon unlike any I had ever seen before.

Nothing about the young man computed with what I had just learned about Joseph Spinotta, and I wanted to find out why. But I had just escaped the death of my spirit, and I would not stick around to risk the death of my body.