The Architect (11 page)

“They bailed him out? Where did he go?”

“North has the Chelsea cops out looking for him. If he hears anything ...”

McCormick squinted at him. “You can’t leave it to North. You need to go home.”

“He’ll be fine for the night.” He looked at her, saw that she didn’t believe that any more than he did.

She leaned and kissed him on the cheek. “Go home. Call me and let me know if you find him.”

Clevenger’s throat tightened. He knew she was right. He knew his mind would be in Chelsea with Billy, even if he flew to D.C. with her. But he didn’t want it to be that way. He wanted to start giving her the time she deserved.

She saw he was struggling. “I’m not upset,” she said.

She didn’t sound upset, which, for some reason, made him feel even worse. “I am,” he said.

“Call me tomorrow.” She leaned and kissed him on the cheek, again. “I have to go.” She walked away, headed toward the jetway.

He waited to see if she would turn around after handing over her ticket. She didnt.

TWENTY-TWO

West Crosse waited in
his Thunder Bay, Ontario, compound for the
Nightly News
to begin. He had called Heather Rawlings and told her that he wanted to meet her there the next day to show her an early scale model of the Rawlingses’c Montana home. He asked her to keep her trip a secret, so he could surprise her husband by learning more about his life to incorporate in a final plan.

He believed she would keep his confidence, but it probably didn’t matter if she violated it.

Ken Rawlings would never tell the police.

Crosse had always been careful to avoid suspicion. He was patient, pacing himself, sometimes waiting years after a building was constructed to complete his final design of the family that would occupy it. He cloaked his worjc in secrecy, serving only his Bones brothers and their extended families.

Nonetheless, any of the men or women he had liberated could have focused on him as a suspect in the death of their “loved” one. None had. They were unconsciously
partnered with him. He was expressing their hidden desires. To think of him as a killer would be to think the same of themselves.

Wasn’t that, after all, the way most people lived, outsourcing the hardest parts of living? People who ate meat, but would not hunt. People who would want SWAT teams to rescue them if they were kidnapped, but would never own guns to protect themselves. People who liked premium gas in their SUVs, but would balk at going to war for it. People who liked their homeland safe, but didn’t have the stomach to torture terrorists plotting to destroy it.

Was that not the lesson of Christ? Did he not die alone on a cross for doing God’s work alone?

Ken Rawlings might know that his wife had met West Crosse the night she died, but he would keep that from the police, even if it meant forgetting what he knew. He would protect his friend, even grow closer to him, as close as a hidden chamber of his own heart.

And if Rawlings were Judas and broke faith with Crosse, it would still be too late to stop Crosse’s greatest plan from unfolding.

Crosse had called the White House earlier and arranged to visit two days later to begin gathering as-built dimensions from the East Wing and to meet again with the president and first lady.

He heard music heralding the beginning of the
Nightly News
. The NBC logo appeared.

“In Chicago today,” the anchor’s voice began, over a photograph of the Chicago skyline, “a sixth gruesome slaying of a member of a prominent American family. ... This time, a twenty-two-year-old woman ...”

A photo of Chase Van Myer. “Her body left at an American landmark designed by renowned architect Frank Gehry.” A photo of the Jay Pritzker Pavilion.

Crosse felt a wave of disgust looking at the structure, a 120-foot stainless steel malignancy invading the earth, with unrestrained ribbonlike walls folding in on one another, the whole mess held up by an exposed skeleton of steel tubing. Like so many deconstructionist buildings, Gehry’s was based on twisted axes, disjointed forms, curved facades, flowing, melting volumes of space seemingly without boundaries. Cancer.

It was no wonder that Gehry’s work had come to symbolize the fragmentation of contemporary life, a social order without restraint. Anarchy.

Gehry’s architecture was all about the architect. About self-love. About the radical’s empty joy in roiling tradition.

Crosse loved structure, not tearing it down. His work served his clients” needs, not his own. He knew that freeing them to live more complete lives didn’t have a thing to do with bending the walls of their homes. It meant finding the structure that reflected their inner truths and then achieving it, at any cost. It meant going to war for an architecture that replicated the stunning marriage of form and function found in human anatomy.

Freedom was about drawing the right boundaries, not living without them.

Scout Van Myer appeared on the television, at a press conference outside the magnificent gates in front of his home, surrounded by his wife Carolyn, son Tristan, daughter Gabriela, and several uniformed officers.

“Whoever did this to my daughter will be brought to justice,” he said confidently. “Until that time, I want to thank you for being here today and keeping us in your prayers tomorrow.”

Crosse smiled. Van Myer looked strong and confident—at peace. And Crosse doubted it was an accident he had gathered his wife and children around him for the cameras. He was presenting the Van Myer family, newly constituted, liberated from the tyranny of his daughter’s sickness.

Crosse felt peaceful, too. When you do the right thing, even when it is hard to do, even when the cost is a human life, you can sleep well at night, a happy, tired soldier of the Lord.

He switched to ABC, then CBS, then CNN, all of them focused on Chase Van Myer, on the hand of God.

He turned off the television.

He did not want to die, but he sensed that his life was drawing to a close, that to ask for more time than he needed to complete his masterwork would be to ask too much. He thought of Martin Luther King’s speech foreshadowing his own demise. “I’ve been to the mountaintop,” he had said. “Like anybody, I want to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will.”

Crosse, too, had been to the mountaintop. He had seen God’s truth and carried it in his heart. And he was ready to die in service to it.

He walked into the bathroom, took a straight razor out of his shaving kit, flicked it open. He looked at himself in the mirror, letting his eyes move slowly across his wide shoulders, down his armor-like pectoralis
muscles, his washboard abdomen. He held his arms out to his sides, spread his legs slightly, becoming da Vinci’s divine human form. Then he slowly cut himself, shoulder to shoulder, neck to groin, in the pattern of a cross, just deep enough to start his blood flowing.

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TWENTY-FIVE

AUGUST 14, 2OO5, 7:35 A.M.

Clevenger called Whitney McCormick
on her cell phone. He wanted to update her on what he knew about Yale and Skull and Bones, but he also wanted to reassure himself that she hadn’t written him off for choosing Billy over her the night before.

“How’s Billy?” she answered.

She sounded more like a doctor inquiring about a patient than a woman inquiring about her lover’s adopted son. “In detox,” Clevenger said, and left it at that.

“Great. You did the right thing.”

“Listen, I wanted to ...”

“No need,” she said. “You can’t walk out of his life when he’s in trouble.”

Clevenger wanted to say that Billy’s troubles were over for now, that he wouldn’t be leaving her alone at any more airline gates. But he couldn’t know that. “How about if I come down to D.C. for dinner tonight?”

“Sorry. Meetings.”

“We could make it late.”

“You know what? Let’s hold that thought,” she said. “We’ll definitely do it another time.”

“Okay,” Clevenger said.

“Anything else going on?”

“There’s something on the case, if that’s what you mean.” He half-hoped she would linger a little longer on the personal side of their business together.

“I’m all ears.”

So much for that half hope. He told her about Yale and Skull and Bones and David Groupmann. “North is checking criminal records for everyone over forty on the membership list.”

“We’ll get the list and run them through our system, too,” she said. “I think you should visit with Groupmann again, maybe even today. Check whether he has an alibi for one or more of the killings.”

“I had the same thought. Let me check flights. I could probably get there by dinnertime, then red-eye it back.”

“I’ll make the call, see if he’s available.”

“And if there’s any way to get a list of Skull and Bones members that includes men in their twenties and thirties,” Clevenger said, “that would be terrific. Sut-ton’s list is dated.”

“If anyone can, we can. I’d like to avoid getting the president involved, but if I have to press for that, I will.”

“Let me know.”

“Of course.”

“Alright,” Clevenger said. “Take care.” He moved his thumb to the End button.

“Frank?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m not trying to be hurtful, about the dinner thing or anything else. I just think we have to admit to ourselves that our timing may not ever be right.”

“Whitney—”

“And I want to just leave it at that. Okay? Because, otherwise, I’m not going to get on with my life, and I really need to.”

The way she said those last words gave Clevenger pause. “Are you seeing someone?”

“I mean, sort of, but that’s not even—”

“I didn’t know. I—”

“It’s nothing. This has nothing to do with him.”

Hearing her utter the word “him” hurt almost as much as if she had used his name.

“It’s ... Just, please. Help me out with this, okay? I’ve got a lot on my plate. I can’t afford to get depressed here.”

Clevenger thought about telling her he wanted to talk it over in person, but he knew whatever night he coaxed her to choose could be a night Billy would decide to take on three of the other patients in detox, or to sign himself out of the place, or who knows what. He could deny all that, but probably at her expense. “Okay,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said quietly. “I’ll call you after I talk to Groupmann.”

“Right. Talk to you then.” He hung up.

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TWENTY-SEVEN

Clevenger met with David
Groupmann at 7:00 P.M. in what had been Shauna and Jeffrey’s home at 2910 Broadway in Pacific Heights. At night, the place was even more magnificent, with low sodium landscape lights making the windowpanes glow orange-yellow and turning the perfect lawn into a magic carpet as it rolled toward the Golden Gate Bridge, a river of headlights in the night sky.

Groupmann and Clevenger sat in a den off the central great room, a small space, but two stories high, with randomly crisscrossing fir beams beginning at a height of about ten feet, then rising at least another ten, like a web or a maze. Above them, a piece of glass, illuminated from above, was etched with more crisscrossing, as if the motif continued infinitely.

“A second visit from you can’t be good news,” Groupmann said. He ran his fingers lightly over the arm of his leather club chair.

“It can keep me from coming back a third time,” Clevenger said. He crossed his left leg over his right
thigh, bringing within reach the pistol in an ankle holster under his jeans. Whitney McCormick had arranged for an agent to deliver it to him at a Mobil station outside the San Francisco airport.

Groupmann nodded “How can I help?”

“Tell me about Skull and Bones.”

Groupmann raised an eyebrow. “How would that help?”

“All the victims in this case are connected to that group. Either they belonged themselves or a close relative did. From what I understand, you know a little bit about it”

“Less than I had hoped.”

“You weren’t tapped for it,” Clevenger said.

“And I’m sure you know I took that rather hard,” he deadpanned.

“I read the article in the
New Haven Register
. You tried to break into the Tomb on High Street.”

“It really shouldn’t take a forensic psychiatrist to figure out what that was all about.”

Clevenger kept listening.

“When you’re a twin, everything that happens to your brother—good and bad—either feels like it’s happening to you, or should be. When Jeffrey was tapped, and I wasn’t, I assumed he would turn them down.”

“But he didn’t.”

“No. And I didn’t want to be left behind. I didn’t want him keeping secrets from me. I wanted in. Figuratively, and literally.”

“They made you pay for trying.”

“They jumped me one night, beat me up pretty
badly. Broken arm, ribs, a concussion.” He looked down. “I recovered.”

“Your brother wasn’t there to defend you “

Groupmann didn’t look up for a few seconds. When he did, it was with a forced smile. “No. He wasn’t there to defend me. Which was a gift, really. I learned I was my own person.”

He didn’t sound like he appreciated the lesson. He sounded hurt and bitter. Clevenger suddenly had a gut feeling Skull and Bones had come between David and Jeffrey Groupmann in a very dramatic way that night. After all, weren’t Bones brothers closer to one another than their own flesh and blood? “You refused to press charges,” he said. “Who jumped you? Did you recognize any of them?”

Groupmann’s nearly black eyes caught the light and flashed like obsidian. “What’s your real question?”

“Was your brother one of them?”

“Yes,” he said coldly.

“Did he...?”

“He broke my right arm.”

Clevenger felt the weight of that revelation settle somewhere deep inside him. He had to clear his throat to speak. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Let’s stay focused,” Groupmann said. “You must be wondering how hard I took it.”

Clevenger didn’t respond.