Near Death (29 page)

“Tough gal,” Cyrus said.

“Yeah, she was tough. He came at her in the kitchen one night with his fists. She picked up a steak knife and cut him. He took it away from her and put it through her chest. She died later, in the ambulance. Meanwhile, he ran into the bedroom, got his gun, came back into the kitchen and blew his brains out against the refrigerator door.”

Cyrus stopped walking. “Where were you?”

“With my aunt, a schoolteacher; I used to stay there a lot. It was sane there and she liked to read to me. She wound up taking me in, raising me.”

“Jesus,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

“No, I’m glad I told you.”

They started walking again in silence, all the way to the hospital entrance where she let him touch her hand when they parted.

Thirty-eight

22 DAYS

Communal life in Bar Harbor was taking on a rhythm like the tides as winter began to lose its grip and the snow cover began to recede.

In the mornings, they’d cook as a group and clear up. Sam would assemble the website team in the dining room for daily tasks and log onto the High Cliffs wireless network. Vik and Davis’s job was to scour the site’s message board, dozens of other Bliss sites that had sprung up around the world, and a host of news and social media links. Alex enjoyed receiving a summary of Bliss-related news over his lunch.

Leslie became Sam’s technical lieutenant and the two would decode private messages sent to Alex by ever-forming Inner Peace Crusade satellite groups and encrypt messages Alex wanted to send out. Also, throughout the day they’d rotate the website through a succession of proxy IP addresses to hide their tracks and prevent authorities from shutting them down.

Twice a week, Jessie and Erica would make a run to Ellsworth to the big-box stores, careful not to draw attention by shopping locally in Bar Harbor or frequenting any one place.

Big Steve Mahady gravitated to Joe. Steve was a hunter and had an easy rapport with him. Erica knew where her father hid the key to the gun safe that was stocked with pistols, hunting rifles, and a good supply of ammo. The two men would hang out on the grounds, guns shoved into their coat pockets, keeping an eye on the driveway and surrounding woods, Joe happily drawing on a cigarette.

Alex liked sitting in the library, writing on a pad and watching the waves form in the distance. Jessie spent most of her time near him, filling his coffee cup, being there when he wanted to stroke her hair. He was making an effort to keep his head from swelling in conceit, but it was getting harder by the day. His website had gotten hundreds of millions of hits,
Bliss
and
Alex Weller
were the most Googled items on the web and the news was dominated every day by the growing “epidemic,” a term Alex had come to despise.

Despite efforts of the DEA and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to police the border crossings and clamp down on smuggling, there seemed to be a sufficient supply of
Bliss to feed the growing demand. Every time Alex read of a seizure at the Mexican border, he thought of Miguel Cifuentes, grinned, and wondered; but on Sam’s advice, he and everyone else switched off their cell phones for good. He doubted he’d ever speak to Miguel again.

In any event, his mind was onto bigger topics: just over three weeks to go. There was so much to do, his head spun.
Direct action. Action by proxy
. The world had to be ripe for his plan; otherwise the countdown might come and go with a thud. He wished he hadn’t been so aggressive. Thirty days! He couldn’t very well reset his clock … how would that look?

That evening, like all other evenings, they had a group dinner then retreated to their bedrooms to take Bliss. It was a paler experience than the Ultimate Bliss they’d all taken but it was still marvelous, as always. They were grateful to Melissa for her sacrifice, for letting them unpeel the next layer of the onion. Later that night, when they gathered around the fire in the great room to talk about the future of the movement, Alex looked around the circle and wondered who would be next to sacrifice him- or herself for the greater good.

In Rhode Island, Dan Mueller was making his way from
cottage to cottage, doing his first property check since New Year’s Day. He was paid by the local beach association in Narragansett to do monthly inspections of the seasonal units but in January he tore ligaments in his ankle and he was damned if he was going to make the rounds on crutches. The cottages could wait for him to heal.

He swore out loud at the sight of Unit 6. The back door jamb was missing a splinter the size of a chair leg and small pieces of wood littered the deck. “For Christ sakes,” he grumbled. “Goddamned kids.”

The broken door didn’t need a key. He swung it open and looked into the unit, expecting to see a royal mess, but everything in the living room looked fine. The kitchen and bathroom were okay too. He went into the bedroom prepared to find piles of beer cans or some sign of mischief but everything was neat and tidy. He turned to leave but something under the bed caught his attention. Flexing his good ankle he lowered himself onto one knee to get a better look.

His other leg buckled and in an instant he was down on both knees, as though in prayer.

“Oh my good Lord!”

The Rhode Island medical examiner remembered the memo
he’d received a few months earlier from the Boston FBI office: Be on the lookout for unusual skull piercings, particularly in young female homicides. The frozen girl had a telltale wound in her temporal bone. Alarm bells went off.

Cyrus and Avakian were on the scene within hours of the discovery.

“How long’s she been here?” Avakian asked, his hands in his pockets for warmth.

“There’s no telling,” the ME said. “I’ve had a striped bass in my freezer since last summer. It’s softer than she is.”

“Any other evidence?” Cyrus asked. He tried not to look at the girl too closely. She was very young.

The Narragansett chief of police was there personally. He didn’t get many murders in his town. “Just this,” he said, retrieving a plastic evidence bag from a larger brown paper sack. “There was a coin under her body, a quarter.”

“Do me a favor,” Cyrus said. “If you find fingerprints, e-mail them to me right away.”

The following evening, Alex finished the last of his chicken curry and sat quietly at the head of the kitchen table listening to the happy banter of his people. The
kitchen TV was on low but no one was paying any attention. The days were getting a little longer and there was a lovely glow to the evening sky. In an hour or so, they’d take Bliss—but several had told him privately that they desperately wanted Ultimate Bliss again. The last time the topic came up as a group, no one had stepped forward. Alex had an idea. He’d spent the day thinking about it and now was the time to put it into play.

“I have an announcement,” he said.

The table went quiet.

“I think it’s time for us to take Ultimate Bliss again.” He got up and went to a cupboard where he’d left a glass bowl earlier. “I think we should do a lottery. I think that’s the best way to go. Does anyone disagree?”

Everyone had thin-lipped looks of surprise but no one objected. They all agreed it was a good idea. They’d abide by it if that’s the way Alex wanted to go.

“I’ve got your names written on slips of paper,” he said, holding up the bowl. “I’ll pick one. I’ll do it tonight and I’ll process the fluid. We’ll be able to take it tomorrow.”

Jessie was looking down at her shoes, her lip quivering.

You don’t have to worry
, Alex thought. He’d folded her
slip smaller than the others; Joe and Sam’s too. They were too important to him. He put his hand into the bowl, felt around, and fished out one of the bigger ones.

He was about to unfold it when he saw a face on the TV. “Turn up the sound,” he ordered.

Erica got up and pushed the Volume button.

Cyrus O’Malley was at a podium adorned with the FBI seal speaking into a bank of microphones.

“Today, the FBI is announcing the arrest warrant for Doctor Alex Weller. Doctor Weller, who is well known for his Internet postings regarding the illegal drug, Bliss, is wanted for the murder of Amber Fay Hodge, seventeen years of age, a resident of Roslindale, Massachusetts, found murdered earlier this week in Narragansett, Rhode Island.” A picture of Alex appeared on a screen behind him. “This is Doctor Weller. His fingerprints were found at the murder scene. Currently, his whereabouts are unknown. If you have information about his location, I urge you to come forward to your local police or the FBI.”

Alex got up and turned off the TV. Then he returned to his chair. The room was silent. Every eye was on him. “I’m not surprised,” he said. “I thought it would come to something like this. This man, Cyrus O’Malley, has had it in for me. Jessie and Davis know it. Now that Bliss is a
phenomenon, they’re trying to stop our movement by stopping me. It’s not going to work. I don’t know this woman. It’s trumped up. Sam, we need to put out a statement on our website tonight. I’ll write it now.”

“What about the lottery?” Jessie asked.

Alex tossed the chosen slip back into the bowl without looking at it. He stared hard at the TV screen and watched Cyrus’s muted lips move.

“Forget the lottery,” he said. “I’ve got a better idea.”

Thirty-nine

19 DAYS

Tara’s babysitter that afternoon wasn’t really a babysitter. She was one of her mother’s best friends, a woman named Jane who lived in the same subdivision, three houses down. A couple of times a week she’d come over to give Marian a break, letting her have a chance to get her hair done or take a class at the health club.

While Tara napped, Jane sat on a padded rocker by Tara’s bed reading a magazine. The doorbell rang.

It wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where people were suspicious about opening doors in the middle of the day. At first glance, the men looked pleasant and friendly: a large man with twinkly eyes and a full brown beard, and a more athletic-looking fellow with darting eyes.

“Hi,” the large man said. “Are you Marian?”

“No, I’m her friend, Jane. Can I help you?”

“Is Marian home? Or her husband?”

“I’m sorry. Are they expecting you?”

The smaller man took a handgun from his pocket,
pointed it at her head and shoved her inside. When she screamed he threatened in a foreign accent, “Shut up right now or I’ll make you shut up. Where’s the girl?”

Jane tried to contain her hysteria and could hardly make it up the staircase without her legs giving out. When her sobs got too loud for the rough man’s liking she felt the gun stick into her ribs.

At the door to Tara’s room, she managed to stammer, “Wh-What do you want?”

She was told to sit on the rocking chair. As the girl slept on, the rough man kept the gun pointed at her while the bearded one took gauze and duct tape from his pocket. He covered Jane’s mouth with cloth, made some quick tape loops around her head and when she was silenced, made bigger loops to cocoon her to the chair. The other man relaxed and put his gun away.

Jane stared with wild eyes as the rough man leaned over and plucked Tara from her bed, bedclothes and all. She woke up, confused. “Who are you?”

“I’m a friend of your daddy’s and a friend of your doctor’s. Doctor Alex, remember him? The one with a ponytail.”

She nodded.

“They want to see you, sweetheart.”

“Why aren’t they here?”

“They want you to come to them.”

“Why did you put tape around Jane?”

“Too many questions, love. Time to go.” He looked at Jane and said to her, “You tell Cyrus O’Malley that Alex Weller’s got his daughter. You’ve heard of him, right?”

She nodded in terror.

“You tell him to lay off—to leave Alex alone. You tell him the alternative’s not pretty.” He spied a cluster of medicine bottles on the dresser. “These hers?”

Jane nodded and the bearded man scooped them up.

At the door, Tara screamed and pointed to her bed. “Freddy! Give me Freddy!”

Joe Weller pointed with his chin, “Christ, Steve, get her bloody bear, will you?”

Forty

18 DAYS

Cyrus couldn’t find a way to shut down the panic. No body position, no thought process—nothing could squelch the white-hot fear that stabbed at him unabated from the moment he heard Marian screaming into the phone.

Stanley Minot pulled every available agent in the Boston office onto the hunt for Tara’s abductors and put in an SOS to Washington to send more. Avakian tried to get Cyrus to go home or at least to his own house so Pete’s wife could look after him. O’Malley refused to leave the office, though, and Minot didn’t have the heart to force him away. He sat at his desk, staring out the window in shell shock, until Avakian came in and said, “There’s someone in the lobby for you, an Emily Frost. Do you want to see her?”

Cyrus had phoned her, a short woeful call. She dropped all her appointments and came as quickly as she could.

“My God, Cyrus,” she said when Avakian left her at his door.

“Emily.”

He was ashen. She pulled a chair over and sat beside him. “Has there been any news?”

He shook his head. “There’s a team at Marian’s house. They’re interviewing her friend. They’re doing forensics. I swear to God, I’m going to kill him.”

“I know,” she said gently. “It’s hard to comprehend his cruelty. I’m not going to ask you how you’re doing but how’s Marian?”

“Marty told me they had to be put on tranquilizers. As much as I want to kill Weller, she wants to see me dead.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“She thinks it is. For Christ sake, Emily, maybe she’s right.”

“That’s not true! You were doing your job.” After the news conference on Weller’s arrest warrant, Cyrus and Emily had talked on the phone long into the night. He’d finally been able to unburden himself, to tell her what kind of a monster Weller was. “Even with everything I know about him now, to use an innocent child to get to you … it’s horrible,” she said, touching his sleeve. “Your friend Pete asked if I could get you to leave for a couple of hours. Can I take you for a drink? Please?”

Minot took personal charge of Tara’s case. In his day, he’d been a good field agent and years as an administrator hadn’t much dulled his edge. When he learned that one of the abductors was probably British, he had one of his agents play the neighbor, Jane, audio clips of a variety of English accents. She picked the one from Liverpool.