The Architect (14 page)

At Holmes’s side as he wrote his decision was his trusted assistant and confidant, Harvey Hollister Bundy, a brilliant Bonesman who also served as special assistant to Secretary of War Henry Lewis Stimson. Stimson, himself Skull and Bones, was instrumental in the decision to drop nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War n, demolishing an evil empire that would have destroyed world freedom.

It would always be left to men of action and men of God to put in place those designs necessary to perfect human experience and liberate men to live more complete lives. Because, as Kennedy said: “Here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.”

In this world, Bonesmen would always do infinitely more than their share. It was in their genes and their souls, their biological and spiritual destiny.

Crosse heard footsteps coming toward the door. He made no attempt to hide. He had carte blanche to wander the house. In the same way that his clients always
neglected to mention his name to the police, they explained away even his most suspicious behaviors. They would be his unconscious accomplices to the end.

And the end was near.

The doorknob turned, the door opened, and Blaire Buckley herself walked in.

She had grown taller than in Crosse’s photos and had put on a good deal of weight. She wore jeans and an oversized Britney Spears T-shirt that did little to conceal her oversized breasts.

She took three steps, saw Crosse, and stood still, a deer in headlights.

“Hello, Blaire,” he said. “I’m sorry if I frightened you. My name is West. I’m a friend of your parents. I’m helping your mom design her museum.”

“She said it was okay for you to come up here?”

“Sure. Do you want to call her and check?”

“No. It’s okay. What do you want?”

Crosse smiled at her directness, born of neuronal circuitry with little complexity and less resistance. She had a question, she asked it. She was hungry, she ate. She wanted sex, she had it. “I heard the good news from your parents,” he said, “about your baby.”

She tried to fight off a smile, but couldn’t, showing her slightly crooked, slightly yellowed teeth. Her hand drifted to her fat belly. “Eden,” she said.

“Eden?”

“My baby. Do you like her name?”

Maybe for a normal child of a normal mother, Crosse thought to himself. “You know you’re carrying a girl?” he asked.

She nodded.

It was too early for her doctor to know. “I guess you can just tell,” he said.

“Uh-huh.”

“And you want the baby?”

“Want her?” she asked, incredulously. “I can’t wait. I want to be a mom really, really bad. More than anything.”

“You’re not worried whether the baby—little Eden— could be ... slow, mentally—the way you are?”

She shook her head. “Not as long as she’s happy like I am.”

She didn’t even seem hurt by what he had said. She didn’t seem to have the capacity for hurt, or fear, let alone reason. He couldn’t resist examining her in more depth. “What makes you happy, Blaire?”

She smiled, again, blushed. “Harry, for one thing.”

“Is he the father?”

“Uh-huh. He’s my boyfriend.”

“Does he work? Will he be able to support Eden?”

“Yup.”

“What does he do?”

“He puts things together for a company. Parts to things.”

“At a sheltered workshop? He works with other people like him—and you?”

“Pens,” she said. “He puts together pens and key chains.”

Asked and answered, Crosse thought. “What else makes you happy?”

She looked down at her T-shirt. “Britney.”

More sex, with a little background music. Very elevated. He laughed out loud.

Blaire laughed, too. “Isn’t she totally cool?”

He slowly stopped laughing, then stopped smiling. “Do you believe in God, Blaire?”

“Definitely.”

“Do you think God wanted you to be with Harry and get pregnant?”

“He must have, since I did.”

Dog logic, Crosse thought. If it itches, scratch. Eat your chow until the bowl is empty. It was the best she could do. But human beings with normal brains could do more. They could feel impulses—sexual urges, greed, fear—and control them for a greater good. He kept at it. “Do you think having a baby might make things difficult for your father?”

She shook her head, again. “He’ll be a good grandfather. He’ll like it a lot.”

Crosse smiled. He let a few seconds go by. “Would you like to meet Britney?” he asked.

“Meet her? How?”

“I’m designing her new house.”

“You
know
Britney Spears?” She leaned forward into her excitement, as though her emotions were literally hardwired into her musculature, with no intervening thought process between stimulus and response.

“Yes, I do. And she’s coming to see me here in Washington two days from now. Why don’t you come meet her?”

“I don’t know if my parents ...”

He held up a finger, shook his head. “It has to be our secret. She can’t let anyone know she’s in town. You just have to figure out a way to meet me, two nights from today. Nine o’clock. The Mayflower Hotel. We’ll be in the Presidential Suite.”

“I’ll get there, somehow,” she said.

“If you do, remember to bring something for her to autograph.”

She giggled with excitement. “I got out to see Harry before when I wasn’t supposed to.”

“Apparently,” Crosse said.

“I know I shouldn’t have,” she said. “Everybody was all worried, out looking for me. But it was worth it, you know? Because Eden is special. She’s really going to be somebody. I can feel it.”

THIRTY-FIVE

Clevenger had gotten a
call from North Anderson at 1:40 A.M. that John Rosario had arrested Billy for possession of narcotics. He’d kept him locked up at the Chelsea station a couple of hours, then transferred him to the Nashua Street Jail in Boston, where he was being held without bail. His public defender had steered clear of the Middleton Jail because of the beating Billy had taken there. And he had made it clear to everyone that his client was not taking visitors.

Clevenger knew the guards at Nashua Street. They could let him in to see Billy “by mistake.” But the truth was he wasn’t ready to see him again—not behind bars. He wasn’t ready to field another barrage of questions from him, limited to whether he^would get him a high-powered attorney or try to convince a judge to reinstate his bail. And he definitely wasn’t ready for the kind of empty stare Billy had leveled at him on Suffolk Street.

Instead, he had gone to the office at 4:30 A.M., thrown himself into his work, trying to bury what was
dead and dying inside him in the hunt for a killer, as he had so many times before. He pored over the FBI and local police files on each of the killings, read everything he could on Skull and Bones off the Web, combed Sutton’s list of members.

The list continued to amaze him: Henry R. Luce, founder of Time-Life; Dean Witter, investment banker; Russell Davenport, editor of
Fortune
magazine; Harold Stanley, founder of Morgan Stanley investment bank; Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart; Dino Pionzio, CIA Deputy Chief of Station; Richard Gow, president of Zapata Oil; Representative Jonathan Bing-ham; Senator John Chaffee; John Lilley and Winston Lord, both ambassadors to China.

Loyalty to the order was its creed. Stories of devotion abounded. One son of a Bonesman recalled watching his father bathe for the first time and seeing that he wore his Skull and Bones pin through the skin of his chest.

When thoughts of Billy broke Clevenger’s concentration, he found himself thinking about taking a drink, so he took another Antabuse tablet. He knew the majority of twelve-steppers sneered at the drug, called it a crutch, but having stumbled and fallen badly more times than he cared to think about, a crutch seemed like an idea whose time had come.

By 1:00 P.M. he was sitting with Anderson in his office at Boston Forensics, trying hard to stay awake and stay focused.

“I called the victims” families from Connecticut,” Clevenger said. “Each of them built a new estate—one nine years ago, one seven years ago. And the Hastings
family in Montana built a retreat on Parrot Cay in Turks and Caicos. But none of them would tell me who drew up the plans. They’re all under confidentiality agreements.”

“More important, they’re all Skull and Bones,” Anderson said. He paused. “I checked with the building departments in Southampton, San Francisco, Chicago, and Miami. Each set of plans was stamped by a different architect. Two men, two women.”

“And...” Clevenger said.

“None of them are listed with the American Institute of Building Design or anyone else. No phone directory listings. Nothing. They don’t exist.”

“Don’t they have to show ID or anything when the plans are filed?”

“Usually they’re filed by the general contractors, sometimes by the property owners themselves— whoever pulls the building permit. And nothing says a contractor ever has to meet the architect.”

“What about the Sutton list? Did you look into how many architects are on it?”

“That could be our ticket. I hired two researchers. So far, they’ve only found eight architects. Chasing them down is the second half of my day.”

“Let’s split them up,” Clevenger said.

“Fair enough,” Anderson said. He took a piece of paper out of a folder. “Roger Grains, Manhattan. Johnson Alexander, Philadelphia. West Crosse, also Manhattan. John Bradford, London. Farleigh Smith, right here in Boston. Dennis Jay, Dallas, Texas. Paul Midland, Los Angeles. And last, but not least, Christopher Heinz, D.C. You take the first half, I take the second?”

“Done.”

He ripped the paper in half, handed the top to Clev-enger. “The only one we couldn’t get a current address on was Crosse. I’m saying Manhattan because he worked for several years at a firm there. Jones, Alison Design. But no one I talked to seemed to know where he landed after he left there. I can’t find him in any current database or directory, either.”

“That’s interesting.”

“I thought so, too.”

“I’ll start with him,” Clevenger said. “If the researchers feed us new names, we can split those up, too. If we end up with too many, we get a P.I.”

“I’ll call Aaron Kaplan, tell him he’s on deck. He can be a pain in the ass, sometimes, but he’s relentless.”

“I’ll take that combination any day.”

“I’m starting with Smith since he’s local,” Anderson said. “But then I want to check on this Dennis Jay in Texas.”

“Why him?” Clevenger asked.

“They love the capital punishment thing out there. They executed Karla Faye Tucker, that woman who was reborn in prison, remember? The pope appealed for mercy.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” Clevenger said.

“Simple: If I were a killer, I’d want to be around killing,” Anderson said. “Maybe I wouldn’t know it up here”—he pointed to his head—’but I would in here.” He laid a hand over his heart.

THIRTY-SIX

Clevenger was boarding the
4:00 P.M. US Air Shuttle to LaGuardia when his phone rang. It was Whitney Mc-Cormick. “Hey,” he answered.

“Where are you?” she asked. She sounded worried.

He suddenly realized how deeply his faith in her had been shaken by knowing her father was a Bonesman. Maybe he was half-paranoid, falling headfirst into a crazy conspiracy theory, but he just couldn’t bring himself to tell her that he had called Laine Jones, senior partner at Jones, Alison Design, and was headed for Manhattan.

Jones had given him an honorable response to his request for information about West Crosse. He wanted to be sure Clevenger was actually who he said he was before commenting on a former employee. He was willing to meet for a drink at the Pierre Hotel on Fifth Avenue at 6:30 P.M.

Luckily, Clevenger thinking about a drink after swallowing an Antabuse tablet translated into thinking about dropping dead or getting so sick that he wished
he were. Imagine being choked within an inch of your life—for a couple hours. There was an old saying in psychiatry: Nobody ever has two Antabuse reactions. Either you die or you learn.

“Frank, did you hear me?” McCormick asked.

“I’m in Boston,” he answered, and left it at that.

“Visiting Billy?”

“No,” he said. “A lot’s happened. He’s not in detox.”

“I know. That’s why I’m calling.”

“You know?”

“I know more than you do right now, actually.”

She sounded like a doctor about to deliver bad news. “Whitney,” Clevenger said. “What the hell is going on?”

“There are a bunch of indictments coming down in Massachusetts today. The Royals, that gang Billy hangs out with, are getting rounded up. So is another gang called Night Game, out of Lynn and Somerville. Heroin distribution. Billy’s name is on the list.”

Clevenger lowered himself slowly into an aisle seat on the plane. “What?” he asked.

“They know he’s already in custody at the Nashua Street Jail, but he’s going to be indicted on federal charges now, too.” She let out a long breath. “Why didn’t you tell me he got arrested?”

“It happened so fast, I...”

“Truth.”

He rubbed his eyes. “I don’t know. I think I wanted to keep us separate from all that, somehow.”

“I keep telling you it’s all right. You have to do what you have to do for him. We’re another story.”

But the two stories seemed linked, always had. “How many counts?”

She hesitated.

“Just tell me.”

“Nine.”

“Fuck.” Clevenger felt himself getting lightheaded. Nine indictments for drug distribution could bring twenty years in federal prison.

4Tf he cooperates and helps identify people farther up the food chain, it changes the calculus. I know that’s not a lot for him to hold on to right now—or you—but it would help.”

The calculus. Even though the Supreme Court had finally overturned the sadistic and rigid federal sentencing guidelines that doled out decades in prison like penny candy, plenty of judges still used the same system to sentence drug offenders. Under that system, defendants got a certain number of points for breaking each law. Judges simply added them up, subtracted points for defendants ratting out their suppliers, then moved their fingers a couple columns over, and read off how many years the accused—including first-time, nonviolent offenders— would spend in prison. Nothing Solomonic about it. Might as well have an ATM machine doling out justice.