The Decoy (31 page)

Glenn sits still a moment longer, thinking hard. Then he reaches under the dash and takes out the keys.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Henry drains the last drops of bourbon from his glass and sets it carefully on the desk. As he does, there's a knock at the door.

'We're closed,' he calls.

'It's the janitor,' a voice says. 'There's been a report of a flood on the floor above you. I just need to check for water damage.'

Henry chuckles. 'There's no water coming in here. It wouldn't dare.'

'All the same, Mr Mallory. If I could just check.'

'All right, all right.' He opens the door. The janitor is a young man. He looks at Henry's thin frame and says, 'Boy, am I glad you're not obese.'

'I'm sorry, kid?'

It's the last line Henry Mallory ever delivers. Apart, that is, from the brief speech he makes later, when Glenn finally takes off the gag and permits him to talk.

The realtor is late, and Claire glances at her watch more than once as she waits outside the house. A little way along the road, Positano and Weeks are a reassuring presence in the unmarked Lincoln. She glances their way. Weeks is flicking through the pages of
Playboy.
Positano is staring blankly at her, his mouth moving. Every so often Weeks nods without looking up from his magazine.

She looks again at the outside of the house. It is, as Christian promised, a vast white clapboard construction —
vast, anyway, compared with what she's used to in the city. Here in Westchester, fifty miles upstate, it seems pretty homely by comparison with some of its bigger neighbours. She notices that some of the houses along this road have little placards stuck into their front lawns. Each one says 'Armed Response'.

A car turns the corner into the road. It pulls up alongside her and a woman's face peers through the side window. 'Miss Rodenburg?'

'Yes. Mrs Loncraine?'

'Sorry, I was held up in traffic.' Claire sees Positano lean forward as the realtor gets out of the car, then relax again as he sees that everything's fine.

'No problem. I like the look of the place, anyway.'

'Wait until you see inside. It's wonderful.' She unlocks the door and holds it open for Claire. The hall's as big as Christian's whole apartment, with a double staircase rising up through three storeys at the back.

'Your fianc�'s not with you?' the realtor asks as Claire looks around.

She means, am I wasting my time? Claire thinks. 'No, he had to stay in the city. But he saw the pictures on your web page. And, if I like it, he'll come and have a look this afternoon.'

'Properties like this are very rare,' the realtor says smugly. 'Very rare indeed. This one's just come on the market, and I promise you it'll be sold within a week.' They walk through into a kitchen the size of a basketball court. The fridge alone is larger than any kitchen Claire's ever had.

'Very nice,' she says.

'Wait till you see the upstairs.'

She troops obediently up the stairs behind Mrs Loncraine. Suddenly the other woman stops.

'Oh,' she says.

'What is it?'

'I thought the house was going to be empty,' she says. 'But I think there's somebody here. Hello? Hello?'

'Hello,' a man's voice calls. Claire hears the sound of a shower being turned off. 'Don't mind me,' the voice calls. 'I'm decent.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

Another car turns into the tree-lined street. In the Lincoln, Positano sees it in the rear-view and nudges his partner. 'Company.'

Together they watch the car as it cruises slowly up the street and parks behind them. Two men get out. They're both wearing uniforms. They walk importantly up to the Lincoln, one on each side, unstrapping the flaps of their gun holsters. The one next to Positano taps on the window.

'Yes?' he says, pressing the button.

'Could you tell me what you're doing here, sir?'

'No,' Positano says. He flips his badge at him. 'Suppose you tell me what
you're
doing here.'

'Williams Response. We, uh, had a report of a car acting suspiciously. Thought we'd better check it out.'

'OK, you've checked it. Now back off.'

'No problem, officer,' the security guard says, saluting ironically. 'It's just another hour's overtime to me, know what I mean?' The two guards stroll back to their car and depart.

===OO=OOO=OO===

'This is the master bedroom,' the man says. 'As you can see, it has a wonderful view of the woods. Oh, and the treehouse. My wife built that.'

'Your wife built that herself?' Mrs Loncraine makes a face at Claire behind the man's back.

'Yes. She likes to sleep in there when it's a full moon.'

The realtor laughs uncertainly. The man takes hold of the belt of his bathrobe and sashays up and down the room, swinging it like a dancer with a feather boa. He turns and stops suddenly, staring at Mrs Loncraine. 'My,' he says to her, 'you have such lovely skin colour. Is it real?'

===OO=OOO=OO===

The city controller comes through on the car radio. 'Everything OK with you guys?'

Weeks picks up the mike. 'Apart from nearly getting shot up by some freaking security guards. Anything your end?'

'Plenty. They just found the body of Henry Mallory, the investigator Claire worked with. We don't know if it's connected yet, but take care, all right?'

'Right,' Weeks grunts. He clips the mike back on its holder.

'What did he mean, an hour's overtime?' Positano says.

'Who?'

'That security jerk. He said it's just another hour's overtime.'

'I guess that's how long it takes him to get back to his office or whatever.'

'Yeah, that's what I'm wondering.'

'Why?'

'Well, if he took half an hour to get out here, we couldn't have been the car he was called out to, right? We haven't been here that long.'

Weeks nods slowly.

Positano gets out of the car and pulls his jacket off the back seat. 'I'm going to take a look. Wanna come?'

Weeks picks up
Playboy
. 'Nah.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

The body of the realtor flies through the air, propelled by Glenn Furnish's foot in the small of her back. She falls three storeys before she hits the floor of the cavernous hallway.

'Well,' Glenn says, 'think of it as a feature.' Next to him, Claire screams. She screams deliberately, carefully. A lot of thought goes into Claire's scream, as well as many years of training in projection, breath control, using the diaphragm and voice.

Calmly, Glenn pulls a roll of duct tape from his pocket and measures off a strip as long as his arm.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Positano, unable to open the locked front door, peers through the security shutters. What he sees on the hall floor has him running back to the car, cursing.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Glenn has a car round the back of the house and he lowers her carefully into the trunk. It smells strange, an unfamiliar vinegary smell. She lies in darkness and feels the car bumping over rough ground. After a while she feels stonier ground beneath them, not a road, but some kind of farm track. He's driving through the woods, she guesses, in the opposite direction to the police at the front of the house.

After about ten minutes the car stops and the trunk is opened. Glenn looks down at her. In his hands he has a length of cloth.

'I'm going to blindfold you,' he says calmly. 'Please don't be alarmed.'

When the blindfold is in place, he lifts her into another vehicle. This time the trunk she has to lie in is small, like that of a sports car. But it smells of new wood and polish, like a crate, and the engine note is more like a tractor or a van than a car.

===OO=OOO=OO===

They meet in a hastily convened operations room at the NYPD. Frank, quiet and watchful, his dark face giving nothing away. Christian, his green eyes incandescent with anger, his face white with worry, loudly threatening lawsuits if every cop in the city isn't pulled off other duties to find her, if every helicopter and tracker dog this side of the Rockies isn't mobilized at once. Connie outwardly calm, her fingers rolling the forbidden cigarette, unlit, to and fro between her fingers. Saying nothing, but thinking hard.

===OO=OOO=OO===

The roadblock has caused a long tailback on the entry ramp to the Thruway. Glenn waits calmly, the engine idling, as the queue of cars creeps forward. There's just the one cop, his motorcycle parked behind him, looking at each driver carefully, asking for papers, peering into the well of the seats and checking in the trunks.

When at last it's Glenn's turn he winds down his window. The cop apologizes for making him wait.

'That's OK, officer,' Glenn says politely. He nods his head, to indicate what's behind him. 'This gentleman's not in a hurry, so neither am I.'

The cop looks at the coffin in the back of the hearse. 'Guess not,' he says. He checks the papers, which seem to be in order, then nods Glenn on. 'Have a good day, Mr Samuels.'

The hearse glides slowly on its way.

===OO=OOO=OO===

After an hour's driving she feels the vehicle slowing. It stops, then backs up. Glenn gets out. She hears the scrape of doors being opened. He gets back in, and they reverse through them.

Air on her face tells her the box she's in has been opened. It isn't fresh air, exactly; it smells the way the car trunk had smelled, the same formaldehyde smell, but stronger.

She feels herself being manhandled onto a trolley of some kind. Her wrists are untied so that she can lie flat on her back, and her arms are buckled into some kind of restraint. A sudden brilliant light makes her dark-adapted eyes water, even through the blindfold. Then a sharp pain in the crook of her arm, like an incision, makes her cry out.

Fingers tug at the knot of her blindfold. She can see, but the light above her is dazzling, and the face leaning over her is little more than a silhouette. He reaches for the gag, and takes that off too.

'Listen,' she says, as soon as the gag is removed. 'You don't have to do this. Killing me won't help you, it'll just feed your need to go on killing. You're strong enough to stop yourself. I could help you, but not if you kill me.'

'Of course,' he says, 'you're an
actress.
You want to scream and beg and cry, but you're pretending to be calm instead. And you've been trained, haven't you? You know what to say to me. You know how to fake it.'

'I'm not pretending, Glenn. Not now. Before, when I was helping the police, I was pretending. Not any more.'

'It's what you do,' he says. 'Women. That's what your clothes and make-up and pretty smiles are for, isn't it? You pretend. It doesn't matter. I am the truth. My pieces are true because I am true.'

He speaks calmly, almost conversationally, so that it's a moment before she realizes that she has no idea what he's talking about. 'Where am I?' she asks.

Instead of answering, he flips the light around to show her, sweeping it slowly around the room like a spotlight.

She appears to be in some kind of disused hospital. An operating theatre, perhaps, or an anaesthetic room. There are three or four trolleys, each with some kind of machinery connected to it, alongside big metal sinks, and huge directional lamps, like the one she's under now, some of them cracked. Pipes and cables jut from the walls where equipment has been ripped away. Dirt and slabs of plaster have been pushed into the corners, clearing a space around the trolley on which she is now strapped.

'It's not the cleanest,' he says, following her gaze. 'But don't worry, I've disinfected. Everything works.'

'Was this a hospital?'

He laughs. 'Not exactly. No-one who came here was cured.'

He sets a small camera up on a tripod at her feet. At the back of the camera is a lead, which he plugs into a laptop computer on the next trolley.

'Let me explain,' he says. 'This is a digital camera, Claire. It's hooked up to this computer, which in turn is hooked up to a couple of websites. If someone clicks on the website, they'll see what the camera sees. You, in other words. Live.' He smiles mirthlessly. 'In a manner of speaking.'

She feels blood hammering in her head. 'What do you mean? What is all this?'

His fingers brush across the keys of his computer. 'That was my press release going out,' he says calmly. 'It's gone to all the world's major news services, as well as newsgroups and bulletin boards. Are you OK for make-up? I know you'll want to look your best.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

By noon, the atmosphere in the ops room is sombre. Then the message comes through on the radio that there are video feeds of Claire on the news wires.

'Great,' Christian says. 'This is his first mistake. We'll be able to see where he is now.'

'Hold on,' the voice on the telephone warns. 'According to his press release, it's more complicated than that.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

'You see, when I became aware that this was to be my finale I decided to attempt something a little different.'

He is painting her face now, standing behind her and applying foundation to her cheekbones. 'The tube in your wrist is called a trocar, Claire. It leads to an aspirator pump. When the machine is turned on, it will pump the blood out of your body and replace it with embalming fluid. At some point during that process, your heart will arrest and you will die.'

'What are you waiting for, then?' she says. 'Why not do it now?'

He laughs. 'Well, that's the clever part, you see.'

===OO=OOO=OO===

In the operation room Connie, Durban and Weeks sit hunched over a computer, staring at the text on the screen.

When a thousand people have logged on to this webcam, it will automatically trigger a switch. You will then have the pleasure of watching the subject die in front of your eyes. Any attempt by the authorities to close the camera down will have a similar effect. Click
here
to access the camera, but only if you want to be one of the thousand individuals who will become active participants in this unique artwork.

This web event is entitled
To The Reader,
after the famous poem by Baudelaire that inspired it. Click
here
if you would like to read the poem.